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Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review

January 2009
Emotion Review 1(1):60-85

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Catholic University of Louvain

This review demonstrates that an individualist view of emotion and regulation is untenable. First, I question the plausibility of a developmental shift away from social interdependency in emotion regulation. Second, I show that there are multiple reasons for emotional experiences in adults to elicit a process of social sharing of emotion, and I review the supporting evidence. Third, I look at effects that emotion sharing entails at the interpersonal and at the collective levels. Fourth, I examine the contribution of emotional sharing to emotion regulation together with the relevant empirical evidence. Finally, the various functions that the social sharing of emotion fulfills are reviewed and the relevance of the social sharing of emotion for emotion scientists is discussed.

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To appear in the first issue (January 2009) of Emotion Review, a new journal of ISRE

(International Society for Research on Emotion), SAGE Publishing.

Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion:

Theory and Empirical Review

Bernard Rimé

University of Louvain (UCL) at Louvain-la-Neuve,

Belgium

Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion:

Theory and Empirical Review

Abstract

This review demonstrates that an individualist view of emotion and regulation is

untenable. First, I question the plausibility of a developmental shift away from social

interdependency in emotion regulation. Second, I show that there are multiple reasons for

emotional experiences in adults to elicit a process of social sharing of emotion, and I review

the supporting evidence. Third, I look at effects that emotion sharing entails at the

interpersonal and at the collective levels. Fourth, I examine the contribution of emotional

sharing to emotion regulation together with the relevant empirical evidence. Finally, the

various functions that the social sharing of emotion fulfils are reviewed and the relevance of

the social sharing of emotion for emotion scientists is discussed.

Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion:

Theory and Empirical Review

Emotion regulation in children is universally recognized as an interpersonal process

since the advent of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969; Harlow, 1959). In contrast, prevailing

concepts for emotion regulation and emotional coping in adults are generally devoid of a link

with interdependency or social relationships (Dunahoo, Hobfoll, Monnier, Hulsizer, &

Johnson, 1998)—e.g., problem-focused and emotion-focused coping (Lazarus & Folkman,

1984), personal agency (Bandura, 1982), meaning-making coping (Park & Folkman, 1997),

and emotional expression and suppression (Gross, 2007). Current views thus imply that in the

course of their development, individuals eliminate social dependence. To become mature

adults, individuals should demonstrate their ability to regulate adaptation problems

independently of external intervention. Such an assumption fits prevailing values of Western

psychological science that emphasize autonomy and separation over relationality (Gilligan,

1982; Sampson, 1983). In psychological research, the healthy individual is largely seen as one

who is “self-contained, independent and self-reliant, capable of asserting himself and

influencing his environment” (Riger, 1993, p. 280). This view was termed “rugged

individualism” (Riger, 1993), or the Lone Ranger, “man against the elements” perspective

(Dunahoo et al., 1998). It pits man against the elements in a fight for survival. In such a

context, control and action are highlighted whereas social and communal aspects of coping

are ignored (Riger, 1993).

The present review demonstrates that in the field of emotion and regulation, a rugged

individualist view is untenable. I proceed as follows. First, taking a close look at the

developmental course, I review the knowledge and abilities acquired by children with respect

to emotion regulation, and I then question the plausibility of a developmental shift away from

social interdependency in this respect. Second, based upon an examination of the impact of

emotional experiences, I show that there are multiple reasons to predict that emotional

experiences in adults open upon social interaction and emotion sharing and I review the

evidence in support of this prediction. Third, I formulate theoretical propositions predicting

that any private emotional experience entails a number of consequences at the interpersonal

level, as well as at the collective level, and I review the supporting facts. In a final step, I

advance theoretical considerations on the contribution of emotional sharing to emotion

regulation and I examine the relevant empirical evidence. I conclude by briefly reviewing the

various functions that the social sharing of emotion fulfils and by discussing the relevance of

emotion scientists taking the social sharing of emotion into account.

Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in the Developmental Course:

Is a Shift Away from Interdependence Plausible?

The Developmental Course of Emotion Regulation

Interpersonal processes contribute to children’s emotion regulation in many different

ways. First, newborns signal all their discomfort and needs by emitting emotional signals.

Caregivers react to these signals with regularity and continuity thereby bringing the infants’

emotional arousal back to a baseline. Once an attachment is established between an infant and

a caregiver, the infant actively seeks the caregiver in a distressing situation. The caregivers’

presence, contact, and comfort efficiently appease the infant’s emotional state (e.g.,

Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969; Harlow, 1959; Sroufe & Waters,

1976).

Second, by appeasing children, caregivers also allow them to explore threatening

situations and to develop the cognitive tools necessary to prevent further emotional stress. In

this sense, caregivers’ actions not only constitute preconditions to children’s physical and

psychological survival, but also grant them access to the world. Infant rhesus monkeys raised

in social isolation chronically avoided incoming stimuli by upholding an encapsulated posture

and by sheltering their sense organs (Harlow, 1959).

Third, whereas mammals essentially make use of body contact for regulating their

offspring’s emotion, human beings also employ language. Long before children are able to

understand any speech, adults talk to them in distressing situations: they label the situation

and the resulting experience, clarify causes and effects, suggest remedies, formulate

regulation advice, and propose ways of coping. What is obvious from lay observation in this

regard was fully confirmed in recordings of parents’ and doctor’ speech in a routine pediatric

consultation in which children aged 9, 15, 18 or 21 months old underwent a vaccination shot

(Claes & Rimé, 2008). Childrens’ emotional consciousness thus emerges in the context of

adults’ words and sentences. Such a context gives children guidelines for event appraisal,

emotion labelling, and perception of bodily changes, emotional responding, regulation, and

coping.

Fourth, caregivers endow children with cultural information and meanings necessary

to protect them from the impact of the mysterious and hazardous world in which they live

(Becker, 1973) and to shelter them from the distressing impact of raw reality (Berger &

Luckmann, 1967). Such knowledge structures allow them to face the world with no fear and

even with relative confidence.

Fifth, adults’ conversations expose children to a social environment replete with

narration and stories. An average of one story is told every seven minutes of recorded adult

conversation in the presence of children (Bruner, 1990; Heath, 1983; Miller, 1982). Recorded

stories predominantly resulted from situations in which shared beliefs had been violated—i.e.,

from emotion-eliciting situations. While they are listening to adults’ accounts, children learn

to discriminate everyday events from exceptional ones, to discover both what should normally

occur and what might happen, to enlarge their theoretical knowledge about the world, to

exploit the negotiation of meaning that adult accounts entail, and to develop negotiating skills

in turn when they are facing events that did not evolve as they had anticipated (Bruner, 1990).

Sixth, children are actively trained to develop a capacity that is unique to mankind:

they learn to become narrators (Fivush, 1994; Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 1999). They gain the

capacity to inform their conspecifics about what happened to them, to exchange comments

about this experience, to inform them of what their needs are in this regard, and how they

should be taken care of. This capacity also allows children to negotiate with others ex post

facto the appraisal—the meaning and the implications of situations they encountered. By the

same token, children inform others of what may happen, of how one might react, of what the

consequences of such a situation may be, and of the actions to be taken to prevent similar

situations from occurring in the future. The benefit of the capacity for the development of a

shared knowledge on emotional situations and emotional experiences is thus immense.

What was Learned?

This quick review of the developmental course regarding emotion regulation

demonstrates the accumulation of regulation-relevant knowledge and abilities that children

acquire in this process. To sum up, children learn that interpersonal processes (1) have

soothing capacities with regard to emotional distress, (2) can help them to cognitively

confront and process distressing elements, which helps to reduce these elements’ distressing

power, (3) can help them to verbally apprehend and comprehend emotional experiences, (4)

generate cultural knowledge and meanings appropriate for protecting them from the

emotional impact of existential conditions, (5) endow them with stories and narratives replete

with information on what may happen and how one might negotiate the meaning of such

situations, (6) offer them the opportunity to share their emotional experiences with others, to

exchange comments and point of view on such experiences, and by the same token, to

contribute, in their turn, to the shared knowledge on emotion. In sum, children progressively

gain the capacity to enter their own experiences of failed expectations into their cultural

narrative, and to propose possible explanations or meanings for these experiences. They learn

to bring their own stories to the cultural construction that shelters them, and thus to join in the

continuous effort through which members of their community strive to consolidate the

securing dome under which they all live.

The Subsequent Developmental Course: Two Contrasted Hypotheses

Two hypotheses can now be contrasted with regard to the subsequent developmental

course. On the one hand, an individualist view predicts that this complex process involving

the development of interpersonal contacts, of social exchange, and of collective constructions

about emotional experiences vanishes at adolescence. To become mature adults, young people

abandon social interdependence and instead develop their ability to regulate adaptational

problems independently of any external intervention. On the other hand, I claim that the

various processes of interdependent emotion regulation in the developmental course do not

vanish. On the contrary, initially restricted to parental caregivers, children are progressively

exposed to a broader social circle during adolescence and adulthood. This circle essentially

involves elective attachment figures such as friends and romantic partners. From this

perspective, interpersonal contacts, social exchange, and collective constructions about

emotional experiences as they emerge in childhood simply represent consecutive

developmental products that pave the way to interdependent practices that lie at the very core

of adult emotion regulation. As is the case among children, interdependent processes buffer

adults’ emotions, stimulate adults’ cognitive processing of emotional experiences, increase

adults’ personal knowledge about emotion, and contribute to the strengthening of their

interpersonal relationships and social integration. Above all, interdependent processes nourish

the construction of a massive knowledge base and the production of meaning pursued

collectively in every culture since the dawn of human awareness.

A few simple questions can help decide which of these two views is more plausible.

Why would the developmental course involve such remarkable emotion regulation tools if the

fate of these tools is to vanish at the edge of adult life? Why would the developmental course

progressively grant children the tools appropriate for contributing to social knowledge, to

meaning production, and to cultural constructions about emotions if the fate of these tools is

to be substituted with the Lone Ranger attitude? And how would the thousands-years-old

cultural construction be pursued if the Lone Ranger attitude is systematically adopted among

adolescents? I first review successively theoretical and empirical arguments in support of my

alternative hypothesis. Thereafter, I examine the consequences that emotional experiences

entail among mature individuals. This will generate multiple theoretical arguments in support

of my hypothesis.

Consequences of Emotional Experiences

Let me first stress a major and often overlooked characteristic of human emotion. In

the animal world, emotional responding ends when emotional circumstances vanish. When a

predator pounces on its prey, intense emotional displays result in the surrounding flock. For

example, once a cheetah has caught an antelope and carries it away leaving the scene, the

other antelopes return to their grazing activities as if nothing had happened. No preoccupation

or trouble of any kind is manifested in their behavior after the incident. Human beings differ

diametrically from animals in this respect. In our species, any emotion leaves long-lasting

cognitive and social consequences. This is the case not only for important life events and for

traumatic emotional experiences, but also for current life emotions such as joy, anger, fear,

sadness, shame, and the like. Animal models that inspired emotion research (e.g., Cannon,

1917, 1927; Darwin, 1872; MacLean, 1949; Ekman & Friesen, 1972) are simply blind to

these consequences. Hereafter, I will focus first on the consequences that negative emotions

involve, and then on the consequences that positive emotions entail.

Consequences of Negative Emotions

Human beings are continuously engaged in goal-reaching activities (see Fig. 1a).

Negative emotions occur when circumstances interfere with these activities. If the pursuit of a

goal is substantially slowed down, or if it is blocked, this results in a negative emotional state

(e.g. sadness, anger, fear, shame, etc.) (Carver & Scheier, 1990, 2001). Yet, current views

generally ignore that such a state is no more than the visible part of an iceberg. A negative

emotional state fuels cognitive work. It also stimulates social exchange. In addition, it

activates the attachment system.

Negative emotions fuel cognitive work. Goal-reaching activities rely upon two

complementary capacities: (1) the capacity to predict states of the world and the consequences

of one’s action, and (2) the capacity to control situations and to bring forth states of the world

one had planned (see Fig. 1a). Exerting these capacities presumes a continuous reliance upon

a large knowledge base that individuals possess under various formats—schemas, models of

the world, implicit theories, world views, assumptions, and so forth. Dotted lines in Figure 1a,

represent how a feedback system links goal-reaching activities and the knowledge base. Thus,

when conditions interfere with the pursuit or attainment of a goal, components of this

knowledge base are invalidated. When elements of individuals’ experience disconfirm aspects

of their’ schemas, models, theories, or assumptions (Fig. 1b), a state of cognitive dissonance

results. This leads to the prediction that negative emotions necessarily are at the beginning of

cognitive efforts toward dissonance reduction (Festinger, 1957).

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about here

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Such reasoning was anticipated by classic authors. Hadley Cantril (1950) viewed

emotions as occurring when people confront events for which their assumptive world did not

prepare them. He states that in situations that challenge people’s world comprehension,

emotions supply a search for meaning. Similarly, Georges Kelly (1955) maintains that

emotions take place in moments when events “do not stick” with constructions that one

applies to them, thus compelling individuals to modify these constructions. Both Cantril and

Kelly view emotion as sparking cognitive work.

Research on conditions that initiate cognitive work led to very similar considerations.

Hastie (1984) demonstrates that deviation from an expected course of events offers the most

basic instigation of causal reasoning. Kruglanski (1996) views cognitive activity as typically

initiated when a discrepancy is perceived between an actual and a desired state. Martin and

Tesser (1989) argue that when the progression toward a goal is blocked or when a

discrepancy occurs between the current state of affairs and the expected situation, conditions

for the development of a ruminative cognitive activity are met. That such conditions relate to

emotion was made evident by Mandler (1984) who posits that two types of conditions can

cause emotion: when something which was not expected occurs, or when something which

was expected does not occur. Thus, conditions eliciting emotion overlap those eliciting a

cognitive search. Dissensions, surprises, unexpected events, incidents, accidents, and even

catastrophes all mobilize attention to the production of meaning. When forecasts fail, when

expectations are disconfirmed, when activities in progress are blocked, meaning production

emerges at its best (Weick, 1995).

Numerous data confirms that negative emotions fuel cognitive work. After a negative

emotional event, people engage in an active information search—as made clear in

laypersons’ behaviors after the 9/11 attacks (Rimé, Delfosse, & Corsini, 2005). Memories of

negative events also resurface into consciousness under the guise of intrusive thoughts,

mental images, or mental rumination (Martin & Tesser, 1989; Tait & Silver, 1989). Mild

laboratory-induced emotions readily elicited this effect (Horowitz, 1969; Horowitz and

Becker, 1971; for a review, see Horowitz, 1992). Everyday emotions elicit recurrent thoughts

in the subsequent days and weeks in 95% of cases (e.g., Rimé, Philippot, Boca & Mesquita,

1992). Traumatic episodes especially provoke recurrent intrusive recollections months or

even years after the event (e.g., Bawnes, Gorman & Sayer, 1991; McCammon, Durham,

Allison & Williamson, 1988; Tait & Silver, 1989; Weisaeth, 1989; Wilkinson, 1983). In the

aftermath of collective emotional events, such as the assassination of a nation’s president

(e.g., Curci, Luminet, Finkenauer, & Gisle, 2001), the death of a king (e.g., Finkenauer,

Luminet, Gisle, El-Ahmadi, Van der Linden, & Philippot, 1998), the death of a princes (e.g.,

Hornstein, Brown, Mulligan, 2003) or dramatic events such as 9/11 in New York (e.g.,

Luminet, Curci, Marsh, Wessel, Constantin, Gencoz, & Yogo, 2004), event-rehearsal

proliferates and is demonstrated to mediate the formation of the memory of the event

(Finkenauer, Gisle and Luminet, 1997). Altogether, these various observations support the

proposition that negative emotional experiences fuel cognitive work.

Negative emotions stimulate social comparison, narration, and conversation

Individualist biases lead people in our culture to be convinced that their sense organs are

essentially the source of their information. This is markedly incorrect. In the developmental

process, children continuously combine two sources of information: their sense organs and

people around them. It is this double reliance which allows them to label, categorize,

understand, and endow objects and events that they come across with meanings. That this

process does not vanish among adults was particularly well-captured by what Festinger

(1954) termed social comparison. Under this concept, Festinger addressed the fact that

individuals are continuously motivated to assess their own perceptions and opinions. To this

aim, they compare their views with those of the individuals around them. Through this

process, individuals reach agreement upon world views, values, opinions, concepts, and so

forth. Their social consensus produces a social reality which is as objective as objects

themselves. Social comparison is especially at work when people lack objective standards or

when they face a confusing experience. As evidenced by the cognitive work they elicit,

emotional experiences typically constitute confusing experiences and they are thus expected

to stimulate social comparison.

Schachter (1959) demonstrates that being exposed to an emotional condition elicits a

person’s motivation to seek social contact. In his classic studies, participants who were

anxious at the prospect of being administered electric shocks expressed a preference for

waiting in the company of other persons whereas those for whom the threat was low preferred

to wait alone. This “stress and affiliation” effect generated considerable research (Cottrell &

Epley, 1977). Schachter himself adopted a social comparison explanation of the effect. In his

view, individuals facing stress would attempt to reduce the elicited anxiety by verbally

interacting with others sharing the same fate thereby using others as a gauge for evaluating

their own emotional state. Schachter’s view leads to the inference that negative emotions will

fuel verbal exchange and social comparison.

Schachter was not alone in viewing emotion as opening up social communication.

Bruner (1990) regards narration as playing a central role in the context of emotional

circumstances. In his perspective, no story can emerge as long as events fit common sense

expectations. Motives for narration come forward only when expectations are violated—

which overlaps with the definition of emotional circumstances adopted in this article.

According to Bruner, a story aims to provide unusual circumstances with a form which makes

sense and renders them understandable. It is particularly well-suited to bridging the

exceptional with the ordinary. Thus, Bruner said, if you come across an exception to what is

normally the rule, and if you ask people to explain what happened, their answer generally

takes the form of a story. A motive or an intention is brought forth and a possible world is

sketched in a context in which the encountered exception makes sense. In line with this view,

it can be posited that a negative emotional experience stimulates the production of narration.

In his theory of social representations, Moscovici (1984) stressed that members of a

group continually nourish conversations in social life. In doing so, they converge towards

common representations and shared knowledge. Thus, conversation is the tool by which

people expand an implicit stock of images and ideas which they then take for granted.

Unfamiliar or atypical objects or events instantly trigger a feeling of chaos among individuals

because such objects or events shatter the basis upon which mutual comprehension rested.

Moscovici viewed the production of social representations as the optimal means for absorbing

such threats. Through conversations, social thinking transforms unfamiliar objects or events

into social representations. Emotional events, therefore, fit the conditions described by the

theory of social representations. They question what was taken for granted and they compel

people to reconsider the grounds upon which their beliefs rested. The theory of social

representations thus leads to infer that emotions stimulate conversation in social life.

Negative emotion, distress, and attachment. When a condition interferes with the

pursuit or attainment of a goal, the resulting invalidation of elements of the person’s

knowledge base extends to the self-system who coordinated components of this knowledge

base with plans and actions (see Fig. 1b). As a result, the self is weakened. Its “deflation” is

manifested in reduced self-confidence, reduced feelings of self-efficacy and lower self-

esteem. In everyday life, individuals behave in a context of apparent order and meaning. By

disconfirming expectations, models, and world views, negative emotions undermine this

delicate architecture. Traumatic situations have been shown to be particularly deleterious in

this regard (Epstein, 1973, 1990; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Parkes, 1972). But any emotion has

some impact on this symbolic architecture because emotion develops precisely at its

fissures—or where things are unexpected or get out of control (Corsini & Rimé, 2007;

Epstein, 1973, 1990). By making fissures apparent, emotion makes individuals feel the

weakness of the construction, thereby eliciting a wave of collateral emotional feelings:

anxiety, insecurity, helplessness, estrangement, alienation, loss of self-esteem, and so forth. In

sum, besides the obvious emotional state itself, negative experiences induce a subtle effect—

an effect which is most often overlooked. Negative experiences entail a temporary

destabilization of the person, a generalized distressing condition that a person is highly

motivated to reduce.

Though he favored a social comparison explanation of his “stress and affiliation”

effect, Schachter (1959) also considered other motives to be at play. He mentions emotional

support, or direct distress reduction through the presence of others. Shaver and Klinnert

(1982) advocate that the work on stress and affiliation yield data fully consistent with findings

from research on attachment initiated by Bowlby (1969). This research (e.g., Ainsworth,

Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Sroufe and Waters, 1976) indeed provided ample evidence that

both primate and human infants seek contact with others at times of uncertainty and distress.

Bowlby (1969) himself defines attachment as a resource that children activate when in

distress. Shaver and Klinnert (1982) note that this early form of affiliation was found to serve

two distinct but related functions: direct anxiety reduction and increased cognitive clarity.

They concluded that for both human and nonhuman primates the relationship between distress

and affiliation is maintained throughout life. This leads me to contend that the generalized

distress that negative emotions produce motivate adults to search for emotional support and to

turn to their attachment figures for this purpose.

Conclusions. Negative emotional conditions leave a large wake of cognitive and

social consequences behind them. Negative emotions initiate a state of cognitive dissonance

and are thus at the beginning of important cognitive efforts toward dissonance reduction.

Ample data already exist in support of the general hypothesis that emotions fuel cognitive

work. But, intrapersonal manifestations in the context of information search, mental

rumination, intrusive thoughts, or search for meaning do not close the list of the

consequences that negative emotions entail. For multiple reasons, negative emotions stimulate

social interaction in many forms: social comparison, story-telling and narration, conversation,

and last but not least, a search for emotional support through contact with attachment figures,

or their elective substitutes in adulthood.

Substantial evidence shows that mentally or socially reactivating the memory of an

emotional experience rekindles response components of this experience, such as mental

images, associated feelings, bodily sensations, and physiologic arousal (e.g., Pennebaker &

Beall, 1986; Rimé, Noël & Philippot, 1991b; Schaeffer & Philippot, 2005). Thus, talking

about a negative episode should involve an aversive experience and individuals should avoid

doing so. Yet, the theoretical reasoning has opened up strong arguments in the opposite

direction. Before examining what the relevant empirical evidence reveals in this regard, let me

turn to positive emotions.

Consequences of Positive Emotions

Positive emotions result from circumstances which facilitate goal-reaching activities.

They develop when the pursuit of a goal is substantially accelerated and is attained sooner

than anticipated (Carver & Scheier, 1990, 2001). When this occurs, the subject’s knowledge

base is proved efficient and his or her theories and models are supported. By the same token

(Fig. 1b), the self-system is strengthened and manifests an enhanced self-confidence, stronger

feelings of self-efficacy and a higher self-esteem. Positive emotions thus enhance a subject’s

well-being in two different ways: (1) by the increase of the level of positive affect that they

entail and (2) by the positive feedback that a successful experience brings to the knowledge

base and the self.

As is the case for past negative episodes, re-accessing past positive episodes revives

related feelings and sensations. Consequently, thinking back or talking about a past positive

emotional experience elicits pleasurable emotional feelings. This leads up to the hypothesis

that people are motivated to mentally ruminate upon positive episodes that they have

experienced. Experimental studies conducted long ago by Horowitz and colleagues

(Horowitz, 1969, 1975; Horowitz & Becker, 1971, 1973) support this expectation. They

exposed participants to either a positive emotion-inducing movie or to a negative one. In a

post-film observational session, participants had to signal the occurrence of movie-related

thoughts or mental images while completing a mental task. Compared to a neutral movie

condition, participants who had seen an emotionally-arousing film evidenced significantly

more frequent thoughts and mental images. The respective impact of emotionally-arousing

positive and negative movies was perfectly comparable in this regard. That positive emotional

experiences elicit mental rumination as frequently as negative emotional experiences was later

confirmed in several studies in which the recall of autobiographic emotional episodes was

investigated (Rimé, Mesquita, Philippot, & Boca, 1991a; Rimé, Philippot, Boca, & Mesquita,

1992). To illustrate, as was the case for episodes of sadness, fear, or anger, episodes of joy or

of love-affection were ruminated in more than 90% of occurrences (Rimé et al., 1991a, study

2). Thus, there is little doubt that positive emotional experiences fuel subjects’ thinking.

Langston (1994) views positive emotional episodes as opportunities on which to seize

or “capitalize”—he notes that Bryant (1989) used the term savoring in this respect. Langston

adds that capitalizing on positive emotional experiences can be achieved by seeking social

contacts and letting others know about the event. These situations would offer another

opportunity to enhance one’s positive affect. In two different studies, Langston confirms that

communicating positive events to others was indeed associated with an enhancement of

positive affect far beyond the benefits due to the valence of the positive events themselves.

Gable, Reis, Impett and Asher (2004) confirm these findings. In addition, they observe that

close relationships in which one’s partner typically responds enthusiastically to capitalization

were associated with higher relationship well-being (e.g., intimacy, daily marital satisfaction).

Thus, sharing positive emotions not only boosts individuals’ positive affect, it also enhances

their social bonds.

To sum up, for multiple reasons, negative emotional experiences stimulate social

interaction and communication of the experience. Such a social process develops despite the

fact that talking about a negative episode involves a markedly aversive experience. As regards

positive emotional experiences, such restraint is irrelevant. On the contrary, the research

suggests that positive emotions are savored and capitalized upon, that a good way to achieve

this capitalization is to talk about them, and that doing so is beneficial to existing links with

those with whom such an experience is shared.

Conclusions

The theoretical analysis of the consequences of negative and positive emotions leads

to predict the following. For very different reasons, both negative and positive emotions

stimulate important social interaction. More specifically, I predict that, independently of the

type or valence of the emotions involved, an emotional experience elicits the social sharing of

this experience. Because the consequences of emotions examined in this section hold

independently of the specificities of the personal characteristics of those who experience an

emotion, this prediction should hold whatever the subjects’ gender, education, or culture. In

the next section, relevant empirical data are reviewed.

The Social Sharing of Emotion:

Empirical Evidence

I first define what the social sharing of emotion encompasses. Next I review basic

evidence that emotions are socially shared. I then turn to the exceptions: When is the social

sharing of emotion eluded? Finally, I examine the temporal evolution of the social sharing of

an emotional experience.

What is the Social Sharing of Emotion?

At a street intersection in town, a car hits two youngsters riding a motorbike. The two

severely wounded victims are lying down. In a minute, the crowd of gaping people around

them is so dense that the ambulance stops at a distance and the medics can hardly get through.

Particularly striking is the following fact. Most witnesses are using their cellular phone. They

are reporting the emotional scene on-line to a close person. This anecdotal observation

illustrates the fact that people who experience an emotion then evidence an imperious need to

share it and to talk about it. Before the advent of cellular phones, this need was first expressed

on-site. Witnesses talked to one another, and when back home, they again talked about the

scene with their intimates. These various situations illustrate what I call “the social sharing of

emotion", a process that takes place in the minutes, hours, days, even weeks and months—and

sometimes years, or even an entire life—following an emotional episode. The process entails

a description of the emotional event in a socially-shared language by the person who

experienced it to another (Rimé, 1989; Rimé et al., 1991a). In its full form, the social sharing

of emotion occurs in discourse, when individuals communicate openly with one or more

persons about the circumstances of the emotion-eliciting event and about their own feelings

and emotional reactions. In attenuated forms, it consists of latent or indirect communications

in which the addressee is present only at a symbolic level, as is the case with letters or diaries.

Social Sharing of Emotion: Basic Evidence

Autobiographic data. The first studies which tested this prediction relied upon

autobiographic data. Participants were instructed to recall and briefly describe an emotional

experience from their recent past corresponding to a specified basic emotion (e.g., joy, anger,

fear, shame, or sadness). They then answered questions about their sharing of this episode:

Did they talk about the episode with others? With whom? How long after the emotion? How

often? (Mesquita, 1993; Rimé, et al., 1991a, 1991b; Vergara, 1993). Eight independent

studies of this type were reviewed (Rimé et al., 1992). They involved 1384 emotional

episodes reported by 913 respondents ranging in age from 12 to 72 years. The data showed

that, according to the study, 88 to 96 % of the collected episodes were socially shared. The

modal pattern for an emotion sharing was to be initiated early after the episode, with the first

sharing round taking place during the day the episode happened in about 60% of the cases

across studies. Modal responses also indicated that participants talked about the event

“several times” with “several persons”, suggesting emotion sharing to be a repetitive process

involving a variety of targets. Extent of sharing (i.e., number of repetitions and number of

recipients) was positively correlated with the rated intensity of the emotional experience: The

more intense the emotion was, the more participants talked about it. Thus these early data

strongly supported the view that “every emotion tends to be socially shared”. Obviously,

however, the ex-post facto nature such data were at risk of being unduly inflated. Respondents

might indeed have selectively remembered episodes that they did socially share.

Diary studies. Diary methods were then used in order to reduce the time elapsed

between the emotional episode and data collection. Participants completed a short

questionnaire every night before going to bed. They briefly described the event that had

affected them most that day, they rated it on emotion scales and they then answered questions

about this event, including questions concerning social sharing. This procedure reduced risks

of selective and reconstructive biases and allowed collecting data for current life emotion of

low or moderate intensities. Several studies of this type were conducted (Rimé, Philippot,

Finkenauer, Legast, Moorkens, & Tornqvist, 1994). Previous autobiographic studies

consistently showed that an emotion is shared on the day it happens in about 60% of the

cases. Consequently, diary-reported daily emotional episodes were expected to be shared

before the next night for approximately 60% of them. The findings were precisely in line with

this prediction. To illustrate, in one of the diary studies, emotional episodes were collected

from 34 participants during 14 consecutive nights (Rimé et al., 1994, study 2). On average,

58% of the 461 events reported were shared the day they happened. With the exception of a

marked trend indicating less sharing for cases of shame, this result did not vary as a function

of specific emotions. To conclude, findings from diary studies in which the interval between

the episode and its recall is at maximum one day, replicated those from autobiographic studies

involving intervals of weeks, months, or even years. Thus, it does not seem that findings from

autobiographic studies can be explained by selective or by reconstructive memory biases:

social sharing behaviors appear to be a typical consequence of exposure to emotion, even if

the emotion is mild.

Follow-up procedures. This conclusion was further tested using “follow-up”

procedures. Having the investigators “pre-select” a target event prevented any selection bias

by respondents. Participants were contacted when they were exposed to some important

emotional event and they were then followed up for several weeks. In six such studies, the

target emotional episodes involved respectively (a) bereavement, (b) an important

examination; (c) first blood donation; (d) attending the dissection of a human corpse among

medical students; (e) performing first dissection; (f) first delivery for young mothers (Rimé,

Finkenauer, Luminet, Zech, & Philippot, 1998). In each of these studies, follow-up

questionnaires assessed the occurrence of social sharing immediately after the event and again

at various time intervals. All the follow-up studies offered evidence consistent with earlier

findings. Social sharing occurred during the week following the episode at rates closely

matching those of autobiographic studies (i.e., around 90% of the cases across studies). With

the exception of blood donation, which is a relatively minor emotional episode, the proportion

of episodes that still elicited sharing during the second week was virtually the same as in the

first week. Marked decreases were then generally observed in the following weeks or months.

Steeper extinction slopes were found for less intense emotional events. Altogether, these

findings in which selective memory biases were precluded confirmed that people who were

exposed to emotion engage in social sharing.

Experimental data. As this proposition clearly involves a causal relation,

experimental tests needed to be conducted. Three conditions of emotional intensity were

induced in the lab by exposing participants to short movie excerpts (3 minutes) of respectively

high, moderate, or low emotional intensity (Luminet, Bouts, Delie, Manstead, & Rimé, 2000).

These movies were proved comparable for the type of emotion elicited. Volunteer students

participated with a friend. One member of each pair was randomly assigned to view one of

the movies while the other completed a filler task in another room. After the movie, the

target-participant and friend were brought together in a waiting room and left alone. Their

conversation was unobtrusively tape-recorded. Independent judges later rated the recordings

for time of movie-related talk and for the proportion of words referring to the movie. Three

independent experiments based upon this model showed that compared to participants in the

two other conditions, those exposed to the highly emotional movie talked more about their

experience. To illustrate, nearly 40% of the words spoken by these participants referred to the

movie, as compared to less than 5% of the words spoken by those in the other two conditions.

Thus a 3-minute emotional movie suffices to elicit social sharing. In all three studies, the

moderately intense movie failed to elicit more sharing than the non-emotional control one,

which suggested that social sharing occurs only when an intensity threshold is exceeded.

Additional analyses revealed that individual differences in emotional reactions to the movies

were markedly correlated with the extent of social sharing: the more participants were

emotionally aroused by the movies, the more they talked about it in the waiting room. In one

of the studies, participants came back to the lab two days later and rated their sharing in this

elapsed period. The results paralleled the waiting room findings, thus supporting their

ecological validity.

Altogether, these experiments demonstrated that being exposed to an emotion elicits

the social sharing of this emotion, thereby confirming autobiographic, diary, and follow-up

findings. In a recent study, social sharing of dreams was examined (Curci & Rimé, 2007).

Data showed that the intensity of the emotion experienced in a dream was the better predictor

of the extent to which the dream was socially shared.

Generality of the social sharing of emotion. Studies consistently show that the social

sharing process is initiated early after the eliciting event, that it is generally repetitive, and

that it is addressed to several target persons. The generality of these social consequences of

emotion is largely supported (for reviews, see Rimé et al., 1992, 1998). Social sharing of

emotion occurrs independently of age and gender. Contrary to common stereotypes, women

were not found to be more prone than men to share their emotions. In addition, neither the

type of basic emotion involved nor the emotional valence affected the proportion or extent of

sharing. Fear, anger, and sadness were shared as widely as happiness or love. However, as

will be discussed later, shame and guilt were the exceptions and were shared to a lesser degree

(Finkenauer & Rimé, 1998a). Despite arguments that putting emotion into words might be a

function of verbal abilities or education, the propensity to share emotions was comparable

whether people held a university degree or had an elementary school education (Curci, Rimé,

Gisle, & Baruffol, 2007; Zech, Rimé, De Soir, Versporten, & Van Oyen, 2007). Cross-

cultural comparison also failed to evidence significant differences for the rate of sharing,

which occurred with comparable importance across European samples (e.g., Belgium, France,

the Netherlands, the Basque Country in Spain, Italy), across samples of immigrants in Europe

(from Surinam, or Turkey) (Mesquita, 1993), or across populations as diverse as Asian (South

Korea, Singapore, India, Japan) (e.g., Singh-Manoux & Finkenauer, 2001; Yogo & Onoe,

1998) and North American (e.g. Rimé, Yogo, & Pennebaker, 1996). Yet, the way people

shared fluctuated broadly. Latency, recurrence, or target all varied considerably with culture

(e.g., Singh-Manoux & Finkenauer, 2001).

Intensity of emotion and extent of sharing. The notion of social sharing of emotion

opens upon the prediction that the more an episode is emotional, the more frequently it will be

shared. Thus, a positive linear correlation is expected between the intensity of emotion

elicited by emotional episodes and the extent to which episodes are shared. Studies of

autobiographic recall involving nine independent samples from eight nationalities offer a

moderate support of the predicted relationship (Rimé et al., 1998). Observed correlations were

significant and positive, but in the low range—Pearson r’s ranged from .21 to .35. Laboratory

studies in which error variance was better controlled yielded considerably higher coefficients.

Data from eight laboratory studies relating the intensity of laboratory-induced emotion and

the extent of its sharing in the next few days indeed provided coefficients ranging from .30 to

.63. The curve relating intensity of emotion and extent of sharing manifested a step-function

rather than a linear one. Extent of sharing increased at moderate levels of emotion and

reached a ceiling at higher levels. As I will discuss later, this ceiling effect might result from

the fact that listeners limited their availability to the sharing process.

Targets of social sharing. Who are the targets that people select to share their

emotions with? Interesting trends emerge from the comparison of age groups (Rimé, et al.

1991a, 1991b, 1992; Rimé, Dozier, Vandenplas, & Declercq, 1996). Children aged 6 and 8

who had been exposed to an emotion-eliciting narrative later manifested virtually no sharing

with peers in their classroom. Yet, most of them did share the episode with their father and

mother when they were back home. Other family members were rarely involved in the

sharing of emotions in this age group.

Preadolescents (8 to 12 years old) were surveyed after a night game at summer camp

in which, according to the children’s ratings, the game induced a moderate intensity emotion

in them. They went back home the next day. Three days later, parents’ ratings of their child’s

sharing showed that the night game had been shared by 97% of the participants. Parents

clearly emerged as the privileged sharing partners —mothers in 93% of the cases, and fathers

in 89% of the cases. Siblings served as recipients in 48% of the cases, best friends in 33%,

peers in 37%, and grandparents in only 5%.

Among adolescents (12–18 years old), family members, and predominantly parents,

were by far the most often mentioned sharing targets both among boys and girls. Friends were

the recipients of about one-third of emotional sharing. Romantic partners were rarely

mentioned, either because there was none, or because they were not yet eligible as sharing

partners. But, as age cohorts became older, friends—including girlfriends, boyfriends, and

female best friends—became increasingly important. Other people were rarely mentioned.

Among young adults (18–33 years old), the role of family members was considerably

reduced, especially among males. As a counterpart for both genders, spouses and partners

emerged as important actors on the social sharing stage whereas friends maintained the same

importance as in the adolescents’ data. The role of family members decreased again in

middle-aged adults (40–60 years old) perhaps in part because parents are no longer available.

Additionally, a considerable drop in the importance of friends occurred for male adults, but

not for females. In this age group, spouses and partners markedly predominated as sharing

targets. In men in particular, the spouse or partner was virtually an exclusive target among

more than three-quarters of them. Data collected on elderly people (65–95 years old) simply

replicated this pattern. From adulthood on, spouses and partners became the main sharing

targets (over 75%), followed by family members (over 30%), and friends (about 20%). As

previously mentioned, other categories, such as strangers or professionals, were rarely

addressed (less than 5% of the cases).

In sum, across age groups, targets of social sharing were consistently found to be

intimates (i.e., parents, brothers, sisters, friends, or spouse/partner). Non-intimates hardly

played a role in the sharing process. Professionals (e.g., priests, physicians, teachers,

psychologists, etc.), unfamiliar, or unknown persons were unlikely to be selected for this role.

In both genders, a remarkable evolution was observed with age in selected targets.

Attachment figures (father and mother) are the focus of social sharing of emotion in

childhood. As was predicted in the first section of this review, sharing targets progressively

evolve from parental figures to newly-elected attachment figures, such as friends among

adolescents, friends and spouses/partners among young adults, and predominantly

spouses/partners among mature adults.

These conclusions are somewhat qualified by observations regarding professional

rather than personal emotional episodes. Hospital nurses working in emergency units or in

coronary care units were asked with whom they shared emotional episodes that occurred in

their work (Laurens, 2000). Results revealed that in this case colleagues and other

professionals were the primary sharing partners. Intimates were also involved in the sharing

process, but were addressed to a lesser extent. In another study, police, medical and

psychosocial intervention personnel involved in a rescue operation after a deadly train crash

were surveyed. Though they had shared their emotions about the catastrophe primarily with

their spouses/companion (61%), the primary sharing partners were their colleagues and

members of their team for 39% of them (Zech, Ucros, Rimé, & De Soir, 2002). Colleagues

can thus play an important role in sharing after professional situations, perhaps because they

are seen as more knowledgeable.

Conclusions. Data collected through a variety of methods confirm my prediction that

both positive and negative emotional experiences elicit a process of social sharing of these

experiences. Individuals narrated their experiences in an overwhelming proportion of cases,

and their modal response was that they shared the same episode several times with several

people. As predicted, this behavior was observed independent of emotional valence or of the

type of emotion. In addition, social sharing manifestations occurred at a comparable rate

among people varying in gender, education, and culture. In line with these predictions, data

demonstrated that the intensity of an emotional experience increased the frequency with

which it was shared.

The generality of these findings suggests that emotional sharing is a basic component

of emotion, together with appraisal, expression, bodily changes, action tendencies, and the

like. Data unambiguously confirm that emotional interdependence does not vanish with age.

From adolescence on elected attachment figures succeeded natural attachment figures in the

social sharing of emotion. Parental caregivers were found to be the privileged sharing partners

among children. Adolescents progressively turned to elected attachment figures, with friends

becoming important sharing targets. Among young adults, romantic partners became the main

focus. Finally, among both male and female adults, spouses or romantic partners—core

figures of adult attachment (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver (2007)—were the predominant sharing

target. These observations radically challenge the Lone Ranger individualist view which

predicted that at adolescence individuals would forevermore abandon social interdependence

in emotion regulation.

When is the Social Sharing of Emotion Eluded?

Despite empirical arguments that support the generality of the social sharing of

emotion, there are, of course, exceptions. At least three types of circumstances can be seen to

restrain the social sharing of emotion. First, when an emotional episode elicits self-conscious

emotions such as shame and guilt, these feelings counteract the propensity to share emotion.

This observation follows from the fact that the phenomenal experience characterizing such

emotions is a wish to hide or disappear (Lewis, 2000). People who experience shame or guilt

are thus expected to actively refrain from further exposing themselves and they avoid

narrating these experiences to others.

A second situation in which a phenomenal experience can counteract the propensity to

share an emotion is found in extremely intense or traumatic emotions. On the one hand, in

line with the fact that more intense emotional experiences are shared more extensively,

extremely intense and traumatic emotional experiences should also be shared more

extensively. On the other hand, the notion of trauma (e.g., Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

(PTSD) as described in DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994) implies that the

cues associated with a traumatic experience elicit avoidance. Such a response will most likely

interfere with the propensity to share emotions. This leads to expect the occurrence of a

behavioral compromise between these conflicting motivational forces. Whereas individuals

would talk frequently about a high intensity or traumatic episode through which they have

lived, they would refrain from mentioning the most sensitive issues, thus leaving definite

blanks or holes in their narration.

Finally, although emotion elicits a need for social sharing, the social environment

might not be receptive. In particular, members of the social environment may limit or even

deny the social sharing of emotion for their own protection. This should occur when the

episode to be shared involves elements that are likely to elicit harmful emotions among

listeners. I now turn to the empirical findings relevant to each of these three issues.

Shame and guilt. Investigating emotional experiences that people keep secret tested

the hypothesis that shame and guilt play a critical role in restraining the social sharing of

emotion. In two different studies, participants answered questions either about emotional

memories that they had socially shared, or about emotional memories that they had kept

secret (Finkenauer & Rimé, 1998a). The assumption was that the participants would answer

questions about secrets provided that (1) absolute anonymity would be granted, and

(2) participants would in no way be asked to reveal their secret. The results consistently

showed that neither the intensity of the emotion felt when the event occurred, nor the intensity

of the emotion still felt when responding, discriminated shared from non-shared episodes.

Also, non-shared emotional experiences were no more or no less negatively valenced than

shared ones. However, in line with my prediction, non-shared emotional episodes elicited

more intense feelings of shame and guilt than shared ones in each of two studies. In addition,

emotional appraisal ratings revealed that emotional experiences that were kept secret involved

greater personal responsibility for the event than shared experiences. Finally, data revealed

that non-shared experiences were initially associated with attempts to hide one’s feelings or

emotions, a tendency typical of shamed persons (e.g., Tangney, 1991). These findings thus

support my prediction that when an emotional episode elicits self-conscious emotions such as

shame and guilt, these emotional feelings counteract the powerful propensity to share

emotion.

Extreme intensity and traumatic emotions. Findings converged in showing that

traumatic emotions are frequently shared (e.g., Pennebaker & Harber, 1993; Sydor &

Philippot, 1996) and that approximately 80% of trauma victims manifested the need to share

their experience (e.g., Ersland, Weisaeth, & Sund, 1989; Mitchell & Glickman, 1977). But,

what about blanks or gaps in social sharing? A survey of a large group (N = 1,027) of adults

exposed at various degrees to a catastrophic gas-pipe explosion in 2004 in Belgium provide

relevant findings (Zech, & al., 2007). In this cohort, frequency of sharing about the disaster

was a linear function of the intensity of PTSD symptomatology. However, when sharing

modalities were examined in more details, marked differences discriminated between

participants who fulfilled the criteria for PTSD from those who did not. The former

mentioned much more frequently than the latter aspects (1) that they had never shared, and (2)

that they did not want to share. Thus, in conformity with the prediction, people who were

most affected by an event shared their emotion as often as those who were less affected. Yet,

they also evidenced marked proclivities toward not revealing at least some aspects of their

traumatic experience. It is probable that these undisclosed aspects are particularly critical with

regard to the post-traumatic symptomatology they developed. Future investigation should

explore further the content of undisclosed aspects of traumatic exposure. More generally,

studies of the social sharing of emotion should focus more on the aspects of traumatic

experience which people keep secret.

Social constraint. Studies of responses to collective trauma found enhanced levels of

social sharing and of manifestations of solidarity in the affected community within a period of

two to three weeks following the traumatic event. After this emergency stage, a sharp drop in

social sharing is generally observed. Yet, solidarity is still manifested at a high level for

another month. Two months after the event, solidarity begins a slow decline and spontaneous

sharing disappears from the scene (Pennebaker & Harber, 1993; Gortner & Pennebaker, 2003;

Collins, 2004). At this stage, individuals who are still inclined to share their experience find

themselves rejected. Thus, in their study of the Loma Prieta earthquake, Pennebaker & Harber

(1993) observed important social sharing in the week following the disaster. As time went on,

survivors still wanted to talk, but they did not want to listen to others sharing their

earthquake-related thoughts and emotions about the disaster anymore. At this point, they

started wearing t-shirts that read, “Thank you for not sharing your earthquake experience.”

Thus, receptiveness can work against the propensity to share emotions, a phenomenon which

Pennebaker & Harber (1993) labeled “social constraint.”

Both seriously ill patients and victims of life eventsoften find themselves confronted

with social constraint. In particular, cancer patients claim that expressing their illness-related

issues are particularly problematic to them and disturbing to others around them. Only half of

these patients were satisfied with the social support they received (Peters-Golden, 1982;

Wortman & Dunkel-Schetter, 1979; for a review see Lepore & Revenson, 2006). Similarly, a

majority of victims report unhelpful behaviors from their social environment. They were

exposed to minimization, rude remarks, and the like, which discouraged them from sharing

(Lehman, Ellard, & Wortman, 1986). In interviews with patients in chronic pain, lack of

understanding and lack of listening from their intimates were mentioned among the most

common difficulties in their lives (Herbette, 2002; Herbette & Rimé, 2004). Data confirmed

that nurses, as well as patients’ families, try to avoid or to limit geriatric patients’ discussions

about death (Kastenbaum & Aisenberg, 1972). A majority of healthy people said that they

would do their best to cheer up cancer patients if confronted by them (Peters-Golden, 1982).

Yet, they generally viewed emotional expression as non-adaptive for suffering persons, and

they considered that sharing was not beneficial to them “because it might shatter their will to

fight” (Peters-Golden, 1982; Wortman & Dunkel-Schetter, 1979). It is clear that although the

need for sharing emotion is particularly compelling among patients suffering from severe

illness, potential listeners often exert social constraints in this regard. People who are

particularly in need of social support and social integration are precisely exposed to social

signals in the opposite direction.

Conclusions. The findings confirm that a narrator’s experience of shame and guilt is

the source of restraint in social sharing and favors secrecy. The findings also confirm that a

traumatic response to an extremely intense emotional episode is the source of both frequent

sharing as well as blanks or gaps in this sharing. Finally, many findings confirm that members

of the social environment limit or deny the social sharing of emotion when they anticipate

being exposed to harmful emotions.

Temporal Evolution of the Social Sharing of Emotion

What is the fate of emotional sharing? When do people stop talking about the same

emotional experience? Under what conditions do they keep talking about a given episode?

These questions remain largely open to investigation. Hereafter, I tentatively propose a model

of the temporal evolution of social sharing (see Fig. 2) and I then examine the relevant

empirical findings when available.

---------------------------------------------

Insert Fig. 2 about here

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Immediately after an emotional episode, the experience recurs frequently in a person’s

working memory, increasing his or her thoughts of this experience, and the need to share it.

With each of these emotional memories, the phenomenology of the past episode largely re-

accesses the subject’s consciousness. As time passes, emotional memories of the past episode

become less frequent and its impact on current adaptation becomes progressively negligible.

The slope of this extinction is a function of the initial intensity of the emotional experience

with more intense emotions generating slower extinction slopes. Extinction is attributable to,

at least in part, the fact that new experiences mobilize the subject’s attention so that less and

less resources are available for older memories. At the final stage of evolution, the memory of

an emotional episode becomes “dormant”. Dormant memories have no further impact on

current adaptation. Yet, “dormant” implies that the memory of an emotional experience might

never totally fade away. Recall will occur if the appropriate cues are met in the present

context. When such cues are encountered, the forgotten episode re-emerges and impacts anew

upon current adaptation. Appropriate contextual cues can powerfully reactivate even very

ancient emotional experiences. Emotional memories can also fail to reach a dormant stage. In

this case, they can keep mobilizing current attentional resources to the detriment of novel

situations. People are generally well aware of the “unrecovered” status of such memories.

They overtly express a feeling “to still carry on” a past episode, or “not to be in peace” with it

(Tait & Silver, 1989). Emotional memories which fail to reach a dormant stage still elicit a

need to socially share them. Therefore, a perpetual need to share a past episode indicates that

this episode failed to reach a dormant stage and remains emotionally influential.

In a later section, I will examine the conditions for emotional recovery and the social

sharing of emotion’s contribution to emotional recovery. I now examine the evidence

available with regard to the various hypotheses just mentioned: emotional memories and their

extinction, dormant memory and reactivation, nonextinction and unrecovered memories, and

unrecovered episodes and perpetual sharing.

Emotional memories and their extinction. Several follow-up studies support the

hypothesis that as time passes, emotional memories become less frequent (Rimé et al., 1998).

To illustrate, one week after an important exam, 100% of concerned students still talked about

it; two weeks later 94% of them still did so; three weeks later, however, the rate fell to 50%.

Comparatively, three months after a loss, the proportion of bereaved persons who still shared

their experience was close to 80% (Zech, 1994). As there is little doubt that the loss of a close

person is a more severe emotional experience than an academic exam, such data are consistent

with the prediction that more intense emotions generate slower extinction slopes. In function

of the event intensity, extinction can be expressed in hours, days, weeks, months or even

years. Tait & Silver (1989) asked participants to report on the current impact of the “worse

event of their life.” Although the events collected under this category took place on average

more than 22 years before, they still elicited emotional memories in about half of the sample.

Dormant memory and reactivation. No data are available to specifically test the

prediction that reactivating a dormant memory temporarily reinstates the need to share it. In

his masterpiece, In search of lost time, French author Marcel Proust (1913) gave a famous

description of the flood of sensations, feelings, and other memories of his childhood which

were revived in him by the mere ingestion of a typical French cookie called a “Madeleine.”

His beautiful literary depiction of the experience launched by this recalling cue illustrated

how fast and how far forgotten emotionally-loaded memories are reactivated when the

appropriate conditions are met. In addition, the fact that Proust wrote this piece with exacting

detail points to the notion that reactivated emotional memories reinstate the need to share

them.

Nonextinction and unrecovered memories. The current impact of unrecovered

emotional memories was investigated in a study in which half of the participants were asked

to retrieve from memory a past experience “that still currently affected them” (a recovered

episode), whereas the other half were asked to select a memory “that did not affect them any

more” (an unrecovered episode) (Rimé, Hayward, & Pennebaker, 1996). After recall, all of

the participants answered a questionnaire examining the initial and present impact the recalled

experience produced. Data showed that at the time they occurred, episodes in the two

conditions were fully comparable. They did not differ in emotional impact, their social

sharing had been initiated equally quickly, and sharing had been repeated with comparable

frequency. In contrast, the two types of episodes differed in every regard in their present

impact. Compared to recovered episodes, unrecovered episodes elicited much more intense

emotions at recall. They also aroused a greater need to share, and they were shared more

often. Thus, participants aptly distinguished between recovered and unrecovered emotional

experiences in their autobiographical memory. The data also demonstrated that when a past

emotional memory still affects someone, the person keeps manifesting the need to share it.

This is quite consistent with the general assumption that emotion elicits sharing.

Unrecovered episode and perpetual sharing. That an emotional memory which fails

to reach a dormant stage still elicits social sharing was confirmed in a review of eight

different studies (Rimé et al., 1998). In each study, participants rated the emotional intensity

they felt when remembering a past emotional episode (“residual emotional intensity”) and the

extent to which they (a) still felt the need to talk about it (“residual need to share”), and

(b) still actually talked about it (“actual residual sharing”). The time elapsed between the

target emotional event and these ratings ranged from a week to several years, according to the

study. For each data set, correlations were computed between residual emotional intensity on

the one hand and each of two indices of residual sharing on the other hand. All sixteen

coefficients were positive and significant—they ranged from r = .20 to r = .64. Thus, a quite

consistent link was observed between residual emotional intensity and residual sharing.

A longitudinal observation conducted in the context of a study on life stress

experienced by women during their pregnancy confirmed that unextinguished emotional

experiences elicit an ongoing need to share these experiences (Curci et al., 2007). A sample of

346 women in their 10th to 17th week of pregnancy was interviewed about emotions they

experienced during, or shortly before, pregnancy. Half of them mentioned an important life

event in this period. During the second phase (22nd–30th week of pregnancy), and again at

the third phase of the study (4–5 days after the delivery), these women completed a

questionnaire on the current impact of the event they had reported at the first interview.

Results confirmed that a poorer recovery manifested several weeks or several months after an

episode was associated with a higher residual sharing during the same period. In addition,

structural analyses demonstrated that the extent of residual sharing at a given time strongly

predicted a poorer recovery at the next measurement time.

These results support the view that as long as an emotional memory maintains its

impact, it also elicits a need to share it, as well as actual sharing. But does this mean that

people who fail to recover from an emotion keep talking about it without limit? It was found

that, as was the case for initial emotional intensity and initial sharing, residual sharing

increased at lower levels of residual emotionality whereas a ceiling effect occurred at higher

levels (Rimé et al., 1998). In addition, correlations between residual emotional intensity and

actual sharing were generally lower than those between residual intensity and the need for

sharing. This suggests that people who fail to recover from an emotion feel the need to share

it, but that their actual sharing is somehow restricted. It is likely that these people’s intimates

experienced satiation and developed attitudes of social constraint. In other words, as long as a

memory elicits emotion, people feel the need to talk about it and they actually do so to some

extent. But their propensity to share endlessly is quite probably moderated by discouraging

responses from habitual targets.

Conclusion. The fate of the social sharing of an emotion is to progressively decline

and to finally become a dormant memory. The best known predictor of the slope of this

evolution is the initial intensity of the shared emotion. Some emotional experiences are

exceptional and continue to demand attention to the detriment of current adaptation. In this

case, the emotional experience continues to stimulate a need to share. However, social

constraints exerted by targets usually restrict people from sharing endlessly.

Interpersonal and Collective Consequences of Emotion Sharing

Although social constraints by recipients of social sharing of emotion have already

been mentioned twice in this article, they are by no means frequent responses to social sharing

situations. In this section, I will focus on the effects that sharing situations have on targets and

on the sharing person’s social environment. It will be shown that if individuals who

experienced an emotion are motivated to share this experience with others, the latter generally

lend themselves quite willingly to this type of social interaction. In addition, far from

neglecting thereafter what they were told, the social sharing target more often propagate the

shared content later with their own usual sharing targets. I first develop theoretical views on

targets’ responses to a social sharing round. Next, I examine predictions regarding the

propagation of the social sharing of emotion. Finally, I examine the empirical evidence

related to these two topics.

Interpersonal Dynamic of the Social Sharing of Emotion

When driving by a traffic accident, drivers slow down to watch. Pedestrians change

their route to look at a building in flames. People are attracted to emotional stories in the

media, as well as in movies, novels, plays, drama, opera, songs, images, and so forth. A

fascination for emotional material literally permeates everyday life (Rimé et al., 2005). I thus

predict that a similar fascination is elicited among listeners of the social sharing of emotion.

Once listeners expose themselves to the expressed emotions of a narrator, predictions of the

Perception-Action model of empathy should hold (Preston & de Waal, 2002). This model

states that “attended perception of the object’s state automatically activates the subject’s

representations of the state, situation, and object, and that activation of these representations

automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless

inhibited” (Preston & de Waal, 2002, p. 4). In conjunction with this model, data indeed show

that being exposed to an emotional narrative is in itself an emotion-eliciting situation (Archer

& Berg, 1978; Lazarus, Opton, Monikos, & Rankin, 1965; Shortt & Pennebaker, 1992; Strack

& Coyne, 1983). Listeners in a social sharing situation are thus expected to experience

emotional responses in their turn. Moreover, the intensity of these responses should vary as a

direct function of the intensity of the emotional experience to which they are exposed.

Furthermore, empathy and a feeling of emotional communion should result from the aroused

emotional feelings. Once empathy is elicited, prosocial behavior should follow. More

specifically, I view a social sharing situation as an adult-life analogue of attachment behaviors

as they are described in the caregiver-child relationship. Caregivers respond to infants’

distress by comforting them and by demonstrating love, care, availability, proximity, or

contact (e. g. Bowlby, 1969; Harlow, 1959). I thus expect emotion sharing situations to

stimulate attachment behaviors among targets.

This reasoning suggests that in the social sharing of emotions, a characteristic

interpersonal dynamic takes place. A similar dynamic has already been documented in the

study of self-disclosure (e.g., Reis & Patrick, 1996). This dynamic proceeds as follows (Fig.

3). Person A experiences an emotion and shares it with B. The latter manifests a marked

interest for the shared content and this stimulates Person A to express the emotion more and

more. Consequently, emotional arousal is activated in Person B. A reciprocal stimulation of

emotion thus develops among the interactants and leads to enhanced empathy in Person B.

The latter then experiences a willingness to help and support Person A. The higher the

emotional intensity of the shared episode, the more Person B gives up using verbal expression

and switches to a nonverbal communication mode, with body contact or touching. As a result,

B’s affection for A increases. Similarly A, who is the focus of B’s attention, interest,

empathy, and support, experiences enhanced affection for the latter. This opens upon the

prediction that sharing emotion is effective in bringing a narrator and listener closer to one

another. In sum, social sharing interactions are expected to strengthen social bonds, link the

interactants, and end in enhanced social integration. As sharing targets are predominantly

intimates, the sharing process thus appears to be an efficient tool for refreshing and

consolidating intimacy. In daily life, individuals are busy with their own occupations, and

their social ties loosen. Every emotional experience would thus create a new opportunity to

reinstate intimacy between individuals and their targets.

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To sum up, five specific predictions are formulated with regard to the interpersonal

consequences of sharing an emotion. If they lend themselves to the interaction, exposed

targets are expected to manifest (1) interest, (2) emotional contagion, (3) empathy and

sympathy, (4) attachment behaviors, and (5) enhanced affection for the narrator.

The Social Sharing of Emotion Propagates

As previously discussed, being exposed to an emotional narrative is in itself an

emotion-eliciting situation (Archer & Berg, 1978; Lazarus et al., 1965; Shortt & Pennebaker,

1992; Strack & Coyne, 1983). Consequently, the following hypothesis should be formulated

for the social sharing of emotion. If experiencing an emotion elicits the social sharing of this

emotion, then the listener should in turn share the emotion with a third person. In other words,

a “secondary social sharing” should follow any “primary” sharing interaction. Furthermore,

secondary social sharing is also expected to elicit an emotional response in listeners and,

therefore, a tertiary social sharing is expected to occur. This means that an emotional event

activates the dissemination of related emotional information across social networks. In sum, a

social sharing propagation chain is created. As I suggest in Figure 4, when an intense

emotional event affects someone, a considerable number of people in this person’s

community are expected to hear about it through the sharing chain within the next few hours.

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Insert Fig. 4 about here

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Individuals are thus likely to keep track of the emotional experiences affecting their

peers. Such a process would be particularly efficient for the construction of collective

knowledge about emotional events, emotional responses, and their consequences. A continual

updating of this collective knowledge would occur as a function of every new private

emotional experience. Since emotions occur when events are unexpected or unpredicted and

since emotional situations require a quick and appropriate response, the spread of emotion

sharing offers people a particularly effective prevention tool for future situations. The social

consequences of emotions will be considerably enhanced when emotions result from media-

displayed collective events, such as collective loss, victory, defeat, success, failure,

catastrophe, accident, or common threat (Rimé, 2007a). In the case of a private emotion,

sharing propagates essentially in an exocentric direction. When collective emotions are

experienced, there are as many narrators as there are people in the audience and the

propagation should diffuse in many directions. With a private emotion, propagation is

expected to decrease with the social distance from the initial source. In collective emotion,

each sharing round would reactivate felt emotions in as many initial sources, thus reloading

the propagation flow. Consequently, collective emotional events are expected to spark a

social process resembling nuclear chain reactions.

Empirical Evidence

Social-integrative functions of social sharing. Christophe & Rimé (1997) compared

the emotional effects that shared episodes of low, moderate, or high intensity had on listeners.

Supporting the prediction that people are attracted to emotional stories, listeners in all three

conditions manifested a very high level of interest for the shared episode. Most of them rated

the emotion of interest at maximal value on the rating scale. Next, results confirmed the

prediction that listening to another person’s emotional story is emotion-eliciting. Moderate or

high intensity episodes were rated as more influential than low intensity ones, and more

intense episodes elicited stronger negative emotions (fear, sadness, or disgust). Thus, listeners

manifested both positive (interest) and negative affects—this might explain why sharing takes

place even when markedly unpleasant emotions are involved. Further results revealed that

listeners’ responses to the sharing person also varied with the intensity of the shared episode

(Christophe & Rimé, 1997). For low intensity episodes, listeners’ responses consisted mostly

of verbal manifestations and verbal comments aimed at diminishing the seriousness of the

event. These types of responses decreased linearly with increasing intensity of the shared

episode. Conversely, higher intensity episodes generated more displays of nonverbal

behaviors such as touching, body contact, taking into the arms, or kissing, by the recipients. In

sum, increasing levels of emotional intensity prompt sharing interactions to become

decreasingly verbal and increasingly nonverbal. This is in line with the prediction that social

sharing situation would elicit attachment responses on the part of exposed individuals.

Meta-analytic data confirm that people who engage in intimate disclosure tend to be

more well-liked than people who disclose at lower levels, and that additionally, people like

others as a result of having disclosed to them (Collins & Miller, 1994). Laurenceau, Feldman-

Barrett, and Pietromonaco (1998) stressed that emotion is a crucial ingredient in this regard

when they observed that: “self-disclosure of emotion emerged as a more important predictor

of intimacy than did self-disclosure of facts and information” (p. 1238). Espitalier,

Tcherkassof and Delmas (2002) demonstrated that emotion sharing can enhance participants’

social integration. In this study, participants viewed a movie and were then assigned to a

discussion group of four people. The groups were randomly assigned to discuss either

emotional or technical aspects of the movie. Participants in control groups had no discussion.

The strength of the social ties between group participants was then assessed. Compared to the

other two groups, the average strength of these ties was significantly higher in discussion

groups where emotions were shared. Consistent with these findings, Peters & Kashima (2007)

observed that emotion sharing creates a coalition between the narrator and the audience.

When emotion sharing occurred, participants were more bonded with narrators. These authors

concluded from four studies that emotion sharing had powerful consequences for social

structures and group action.

The spread of emotion sharing. Studies tested the prediction that a secondary social

sharing would generally follow primary sharing situations (Christophe & Rimé, 1997). In one

study, participants were asked to recall a recent listening situation in which they heard an

episode resembling those in a list of twenty. By random assignment, they received either a list

of low intensity episodes (i.e., lower end of a classic life-events scale), or of moderate

intensity episodes (i.e., higher end of the same scale), or of high intensity episodes (i.e., a list

of potential elicitors of post traumatic stress). The participants then rated their secondary

social sharing of the recalled episode. The study revealed that secondary social sharing was

mentioned by most respondents (overall, in 78% of the cases), with no significant differences

across conditions. However, as was evidenced for primary social sharing (Rimé et al., 1998),

the frequency of secondary sharing was related to the intensity of the episode. More intense

episodes indeed elicited more repetition of secondary sharing, and had been addressed to a

larger number of partners.

These observations were replicated and expanded upon by Curci and Bellelli (2004).

In one of their studies, volunteer students completed a daily diary for 15 days. Every night,

they reported an episode that someone had shared with them during the day. The data showed

that on average participants encountered such a situation every day and a half (or in 10 out of

the 15 days). Thus, 875 episodes were collected (302 positive and 573 negative). On the day

they were heard, 54% of these episodes were secondarily shared, with no difference as a

function of valence—a result which virtually matches those collected for primary sharing

(i.e., 60% on average, see above). At the end of the diary procedure, participants rated their

total secondary sharing for each of the events they had reported. The data revealed that 55%

of the events that were not shared on the day they were heard were shared on a later day. In

this manner, 75% of all the episodes collected in this study were shared, closely replicating

previous findings (Christophe & Rimé, 1997) relying on autobiographic recall.

Because targets of secondary sharing also experience emotion while listening, a

tertiary sharing should follow. Christophe (1997) found that for one third of participants,

episodes heard in a secondary sharing were indeed shared again with several new listeners,

whereas for another third of the participants, it was shared with one new listener. In total,

two-thirds of secondary listeners manifested some tertiary sharing. This confirmed that an

emotional event sparks the spread of emotional information across social networks. A field

study conducted by Harber & Cohen (2005) supported the propagation chain described in

Fig. 2. In this study, 33 college students visited a hospital morgue within the framework of a

class. Students’ intensity of emotional reactions to this visit was found predictive of the

number of people they told (primary sharing), of the number of people their friends told

(secondary sharing), and of the number of people their friends’ friends told (tertiary sharing).

The study showed that within 10 days, nearly 900 people had heard about this event through

these cascading levels of social sharing. Consistent with these observations, research on

rumors or urban legends demonstrate that the circulation of stories relies upon emotional

rather than informational selection (Heath, Bell, & Sternberg, 2001). When informational

aspects of truth and usefulness were controlled, people were more willing to pass along

stories that elicited stronger emotion. It was also found that more emotional legends were

distributed more widely.

Conclusions

Data confirm that the social sharing of emotion opens up important social

consequences. When receivers lend themselves to the sharing process, a state of emotional

communion is likely to follow. Additionally, in line with my speculation that emotion sharing

is the adult equivalent of attachment manifestations, sharing situations indeed favor the

occurrence of attachment behavior on the part of sharing targets. Further, a good deal of data

reveal that, consistent with hypotheses about secondary and tertiary social sharing, listeners

indeed become actors in their turn in the transmission of emotional episodes, and that a

process of propagation of emotional information develops in this manner in the surrounding

social network. Through this process, everyone in a group learns what happened to one of its

members. The process thus offers a powerful social tool at the service of continual updating

of shared knowledge, theories, and representations. At the same time, each sharing interaction

in a propagation chain brings interactants closer to one another. In sum, beside the outcome

that this person-to-person sharing process has for collective knowledge, it also consolidates

the social integration of the various participants. It can thus be concluded that, unknown to

most, individual emotional experiences have important potential consequences for both social

knowledge and group integration.

Social Sharing of Emotion and Emotion Regulation

Our final topic concerns the contribution of the social sharing of emotion to the

regulation of the shared emotional experience. In this context, I will focus entirely upon

negative episodes. I will begin by considering two facts. First, people are quite eager to share

negative emotions. Second, it is commonly assumed that talking about a negative emotion is a

relief.

The first fact is well illustrated in a study in which participants were asked to describe

a past emotional experience (of joy, anger, fear, or sadness, according to the condition) in

detail, and then answered a questionnaire examining what they had experienced while sharing

(Rimé et al., 1991b). Nearly all of the participants reported mental images of the emotional

event as well as related feelings and bodily sensations. Thus, they re-experienced the shared

episode. Next, they were asked to what extent the sharing was pleasant or painful to them.

Not surprisingly, sharing an experience of joy was rated as more pleasant than sharing a

negative emotion. Yet, sharing fear, sadness, or anger was rated only by a minority as painful

or very painful. Notwithstanding the reactivation of a negative experience, social sharing did

not appear to be as averse as expected. A final question asked whether participants would be

ready to share another past emotional event of the same kind “here and now.” Overall, 93.7%

of the participants gave a positive answer, and their answers did not differ significantly

whether the emotion shared previously was positively (joy) or negatively valenced (fear,

sadness, or anger). These observations reveal a paradox. On the one hand, social sharing

reactivates the components of the emotion which, in the case of a negative emotion, should be

experienced as aversive. On the other hand, sharing an emotion, whether positive or negative,

is a situation to which people are quite willingly inclined. If people are so willing to engage in

a social sharing process despite the reactivation of negative feelings, they should find notable

benefits in these situations.

As regards the second fact mentioned above, common sense often suggests to “talk

out” a negative emotion, or “to get it off your chest.” It is thus assumed that talking would

bring relief. Some 80% of a large survey sample in a Western country endorsed the view that

talking out emotions is helpful and this was then replicated in Hong-Kong (Zech, 2000). Most

psychologists share a similar view since the earliest times of psychotherapy. Freud initially

considered repressed emotions as the main cause of neurosis and he viewed emotional

expression as the appropriate cure (Breuer & Freud, 1885/1955). Though he later changed his

view , many psychologists still emphasize the therapeutic effects of emotional expression (see

Scheff, 1979 for a review) and believe that merely talking about an emotional experience

dissolves its emotional impact. If data could confirm this “expression-discharge” hypothesis,

it would shed light on the reasons why people so unanimously recommend talking out

emotions.

The Double Impact of a Past Negative Emotional Experience

In this section, I examine what the social sharing of emotion brings and what it does

not bring to emotional recovery. First, I re-examine my distinction between the obvious and

the subtle consequences of a negative emotional experience, and I then propose several

hypotheses on the type of action needed to buffer each of these consequences respectively.

Figure 5 summarizes my major points in this regard. Finally, I review the relevant empirical

evidence.

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Obvious impact of a past negative emotion. I argue that a negative emotional

experience maintains an impact upon current adaptation when cognitions involved in the

corresponding memory network sustain the signaling function of emotion. Such cognitions

cause the network to re-access the working memory and to rouse mental rumination, intrusive

thoughts and images, a need to talk, and actual sharing. As previously noted, in such cases

individuals express the feeling not to be at peace with the past episode. Cognitions of three

kinds can provoke such emotional memories (Rimé, 2005; 2007b): (1) representation of goals

which were blocked by the emotion-eliciting situation (Carver & Scheier, 1990; Dembo,

1931; Klinger, 1975; Mandler, 1984; Martin & Tesser, 1989); (2) expectations, schemas,

models, or self- and worldviews which were disconfirmed by the situation (Epstein, 1990,

1991; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Horowitz, 1976, 1979; Piaget, 1946; Taylor, 1983; Taylor &

Brown, 1988); and (3) persistent initial appraisal of the encoded emotional situation—if the

person’s appraisal of the recalled situation duplicates the initial appraisal of this situation, the

same emotion is triggered every time the memory is accessed. To eliminate the current impact

of a past episode, and thus to achieve emotional recovery, emotion regulation should thus turn

off each of these various memory-sustaining cognitions. This requires completion of all the

relevant cognitive tasks: abandonment of one’s frustrated goals, reorganization of one’s

hierarchy of motives, accommodation of one’s models and schemas, re-creation of meaning,

and assimilation of the event through reframing or reappraisal. A thorough completion of

these cognitive tasks would lead to emotional recovery.

Subtle effects of a past negative emotional experience. As I stressed earlier, negative

emotional episodes have collateral effects involving a momentary destabilization of the

person. I argued that the source of such a distressing condition is multifaceted. It involves all

at once goal frustration, discomfirmation of expectations, diccomfirmation of models and

worldviews, loss of symbolic buffers, loss of meaning, and experience of a defeated self. The

condition manifests itself in the form of anxiety, insecurity, helplessness, estrangement,

alienation, loss of self-esteem, loss of self-confidence, and a feeling of loneliness. How could

this distressing condition be buffered? I argue that as a legacy from early attachment schemes,

distress arouses potent socio-affective needs in adults and thus opens up a quest for

appeasement, comfort, love, care, availability, proximity, or contact (e.g,. Bowlby, 1969;

Harlow, 1959); for material help and assistance (e.g. Stroebe & Stroebe, 1996; Thoits, 1984);

for support, reassurance, and esteem (e.g. Epstein, 1973); and for social recognition and

validation (e.g. Wortman & Lehman, 1985). In sum, distressed individuals experience socio-

affective needs. In my view, this quest plays an important role in individuals’ motivation to

socially share their emotional experiences profusely and to do it quite willingly.

Social Sharing Modes and their Effects

To what extent does the social sharing of emotion buffer both the obvious and the

subtle impact of a past negative emotion? I propose that two types of sharing modes need to

be considered. On the one hand, a cognitive mode takes place when social sharing targets

stimulate a narrator’s cognitive work, prompting them to abandon their frustrated goals,

reorganize their hierarchy of motives, accommodate their models and schemas, re-create

meaning, and reframe or re-appraise the episode. On the other hand, the socio-affective mode

contributes to the fulfillment of the socio-affective needs of the narrator by providing him or

her with responses that offer help, support, comfort, consolation, legitimization, attention,

bonding, and empathy. Social sharing rounds developed along a cognitive route can

contribute to the extinction of a past negative experience, and thus achieve emotional

recovery. Social sharing rounds which develop along the socio-affective route would not

contribute to the extinction of a past negative experience. However, they are well-suited to

alleviating narrators’ insecurity, anxiety, helplessness, loneliness, and so forth. When this

happens, narrators experience deep feelings of relief and they describe the situation as highly

beneficial to them. However, when the social sharing process develops along the socio-

affective route in the absence of any cognitive contribution, its relieving effects are expected

only to be temporary. Because socio-affective responses do not extinguish the source of the

subtle effects of a past negative episode, the impact of this episode would reemerge shortly

after the sharing round, opening upon new memories of the episode and a renewed need to

share it. I argue that in routine conditions, social sharing interactions develop predominantly

along the socio-affective route and that this constitutes a major reason why sharing is modally

a repetitive manifestation. At least five arguments support such a view.

First, as it develops routinely, the social sharing of emotion essentially favors socio-

affective processes. Both narrators’ demands and targets’ responses concur with this

conclusion. Narrators’ most immediate demands arise from the activation of their attachment

system. They primarily address their intimates in view of a reduction of their distress. They

thus stimulate attachment responses from their addressees. This favors the interpersonal

dynamic which was described and documented in the previous section and which

prototypically fits the socio-affective mode.

A second argument in favor of a preponderant socio-affective mode lies in the fact that

distressing situations hardly elicit complex responses from nonvictims. Simplistic approaches

and simplistic interventions usually prevail because nonvictims dramatically underestimate a

victim’ situation (e.g. Coates, Wortman, & Abbey, 1979; Goffman, 1963; Wortman &

Lehman, 1985). Exposure to negative circumstances indeed generates anxiety among

bystanders. For the sake of their own protection, their predominant concern is generally a

quick resolution of the crisis. Simple solutions, such as eliminating the cause or extricating

the victim from the problematic situation, dominate (Burleson, 1985; O’Keefe & Delia,

1987). Comforting interventions often consist of low level imperatives focused on action and

recommendations such as “get it off your chest...!” are typical of this kind. Most laypersons

are unable to take into account the complex consequences negative emotional experiences

entail.

A third argument favoring the preponderance of the socio-affective mode in emotional

sharing is that most of the sharing process develops in the period immediately following the

episode. In this period, individuals are generally not ready for the changes implied by the

cognitive work. Emotion-inducing situations, such as goal-blocking, consistently elicited an

initially enhanced concentration on the unattained goal, with invigoration and repetitive

efforts (e.g., Dembo, 1931; Klinger, 1975; Martin & Tesser, 1989). In other words, soon after

an emotion, individuals generally refuse to abandon their frustrated goals, they do not

consider modifying their hierarchy of motives, they stick to their existing schemas, they do

not want to change their representations, they stand by their initial appraisal of the emotional

situation, they do not feel ready to reframe it, nor to change their perspective.

A fourth argument in the same vein comes from the demonstration that when more

intense emotional experiences are socially shared, listeners’ responses become less and less

verbal and increasingly nonverbal (Christophe & Rimé, 1997). Obviously, nonverbal

manifestations cannot be expected to contribute to the cognitive mode. Thus again, at least in

the case of intense emotions, social sharing situations fail to favor this mode.

Fifth, an investigation of the alleged motives for engaging in sharing reveal that

motives of the socio-affective kind prevailed. Four sets of data are available in this regard.

(Delfosse, Nils, Lasserre & Rimé, 2004; Finkenauer & Rimé, 1996; Nils, Delfosse and Rimé,

2005; Wetzer, Zeelenberg, and Pieters, 2005). Three of these data sets came from respondents

who were prompted to recall recent emotional experiences and then asked to list the reasons

why they had engaged in social sharing. The fourth data set (Wetzer et al., 2005) was theory-

based and relied upon the literature on social sharing, on word-of-mouth communication, and

on social interaction. Categorizing the various motives provided 9, 8, 9 and 7 categories,

respectively, with large overlaps between them. A synthesis of these categories is displayed in

Table 1 under twelve classes of motives. Most of the motives in the list manifest considerable

demands addressed to social sharing targets. Partners are indeed expected to provide help and

support, comfort and consolation, legitimization, clarification and meaning, and advice and

solutions. This long list of specific social solicitations is extended further with less specific

and more personally involving demands, such as attention, bonding, and empathy. Thus, the

alleged motives for sharing emotions especially meet socio-affective needs. They also meet

some cognitive regulation needs, such as finding clarification and meaning. Yet, major

cognitive needs such as abandonment of goals, reorganization of motives, reconstruction of

schemas, reframing and reappraisal of the event are simply absent from social demands for

regulation. Participants simply might not be aware of such motives. In any case, the study of

motives for sharing confirm the preponderance of socio-affective demands in the sharing

process.

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Insert Table 1

about here

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Thus, all five elements concur to suggest that spontaneous sharing does generally not

fuel the cognitive route. It should be stressed that nothing precludes listeners from providing

socio-cognitive responses, and therefore the possibility exists for sharing situations to

contribute to emotional recovery. Yet, observing spontaneous social sharing situations

suggests that this is far from being common. Ample opportunity is then open for professional

intervention focused on the cognitive processing of emotional episodes.

This two-mode model leads to an important prediction regarding what can and cannot

be expected, as a result of spontaneous sharing situations. I predict that spontaneous sharing

situations bring narrators an important sense of relief, but no effect upon their emotional

recovery. This prediction stands in sharp contrast to the expression-discharge, or cathartic

hypothesis, which predicts that merely talking about an emotional experience can dissolve its

emotional impact. I believe that what individuals most often experience in sharing situations

are the temporary benefits of the completion of their socio-affective needs. Because people

are indiscriminate in this regard, they equate emotional relief with emotional recovery, and

the benefits they perceive from talking out emotion in an interpersonal context thus reinforces

the false belief that sharing entails "cathartic" effects .

Does the Mere Sharing of Emotions Bring Emotional Recovery? Empirical Evidence

In this section, I examine and discuss the various empirical facts relevant to assessing

the hypothesis that sharing emotions brings emotional recovery. I also examine direct tests of

the respective effects of both the cognitive and socio-affective sharing modes previously

defined.

Written disclosure. In the last two decades, inspired by James Pennebaker’s studies,

scientific interest emerged regarding the effects of written disclosure of emotion on well-

being. In these studies (e.g., Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Colder, & Sharp, 1990;

Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988), participants wrote about past stressful or

traumatic events in their lives for short sessions (15 to 30 minutes) held daily on several

consecutive days. In control groups, participants wrote about trivial topics. The basic finding

of these studies was that when compared to the control group, participants who wrote about

trauma showed both less frequent illness-related visits to a health center and fewer self-

reported illness symptoms at follow-up (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986). Further studies

extended these findings to other health outcomes, including improved immune function

(Esterling, Antoni, Fletcher, Margulies, & Schneiderman, 1994). A meta-analytic review

involving 146 randomized writing studies confirmed written disclosure to be beneficial for

one’s psychological health, physical health, and overall functioning (Frattaroli, 2006).

These findings are generally understood as supporting the view that “putting emotion

into words” is conducive to emotional recovery. It is indeed largely accepted that the

beneficial effects obtained from writing result from mediation of the emotional turmoil

associated with memories of distressing episodes. Whereas writing studies clearly document

the independent (writing) and dependent (health and well-being) variables, they do not

examine whether the hypothetical mediator can explain the relations established between

these variables. In particular, these studies do not assess whether putting a specific emotional

episode into words brings about significant relief of this specific episode’s memory. This is

due in large part to the standard instructions inviting participants to “write about as many

traumatic experiences of their past” as they wished. Admittedly, it can hardly be assessed

whether the memory of many traumatic experiences would have been alleviated as a result of

the procedure. However, the possibility of testing the effects of writing upon emotional

recovery exists. It would suffice to limit the writing instructions to a single, well specified,

emotional episode. This task is still open to future investigation.

Shared vs. secret emotional events. Several studies compared shared and secret

emotions. Participants were asked if they could recall an important emotional life event which

they had kept secret. Consistent with the previous findings by Pennebaker (1989), participants

who reported the memory of a non-shared emotion also reported a higher number of illnesses

than those who did not have such a memory (Finkenauer & Rimé, 1998b). In addition, those

who had not shared at least one emotion scored lower on various markers of life satisfaction.

However, when shared and secret emotional episodes were re-accessed and compared for the

intensity of their emotional impact, no significant difference was observed (Finkenauer &

Rimé, 1998a). Thus, nonshared memories were no more no less emotionally arousing when

re-accessed than shared ones. These findings thus fail to support what the expression-

discharge view would predict.

Extent of social sharing and emotional recovery. The expression-discharge

hypothesis has been further tested in studies wherein participants were observed after a

specific emotional event. The research designs generally involved the assessment of (1) the

initial intensity of emotions elicited by the episode, (2) the extent of sharing that developed

after, and (3) the intensity of emotions elicited when the memory of the episode was later

activated. For each participant, the degree of emotional recovery was established by the

difference between (1) and (3), and it was evaluated by the extent to which this variable

correlated positively with social sharing. Results of these studies—which remained

unpublished due to their negative results—failed to yield such correlations. To illustrate,

(Rimé et al., 1994), participants in a diary study described their most intense emotional

experience of the previous day every evening for three weeks. They then answered questions

about the experience, including intensity of impact and extent of sharing. Two to three weeks

later, participants were reintroduced to six emotional events taken from these diary reports

(three intense, three weak), and they rated each of the events for extent of current sharing,

extent of current rumination, and intensity of current emotional impact. A recovery index was

calculated by subtracting the follow-up impact from the initial impact. Both for initially weak

events and for initially intense ones, this recovery index was negatively correlated with

follow-up sharing. This confirmed again that people who have recovered less from an episode

keep sharing it. But, the recovery index was in no case significantly related to initial sharing

so that the expression-discharge view again failed to be supported.

Experimental induction of social sharing. Pennebaker and Beall (1986) observed that

writing about factual aspects of an emotional episode did not affect their health variables,

whereas writing about emotional aspects did. Experiments involving such variations in

sharing were thus conducted with emotional recovery as a dependent variable (Zech, 2000;

Zech & Rimé, 2005). In three studies, psychology students interviewed a relative about a

recent negative emotional event. In a fourth, participants extensively shared the most

upsetting event of their life with an experimenter. In each of the four studies, participants

were instructed to emphasize either the factual aspects of the episode, or their related feelings.

In control groups, the participants talked about a nonemotional topic. The current emotional

impact that the shared event had when re-accessed was assessed through various indices, for

example, emotional intensity of the memory, intensity of bodily sensations, and action

tendencies. The assessments were done before the sharing interview, immediately after, and

again a couple of days later. In one of the studies, additional assessments were conducted two

months later. In contrast to what the expression-discharge model predicts, none of the studies

yielded effect of sharing type on these indices of emotional impact. However, compared to

those in the factual sharing and in the control conditions, participants in the felt emotions

condition consistently rated the sharing session as more emotionally alleviating, more

cognitively helpful, and more interpersonally beneficial. Thus, the impact of the emotional

memory was not altered in the sharing situation which did not involve the cognitive mode.

Yet, participants who had shared their emotions clearly reported the benefits which were

predicted for sharing situations of the socio-affective kind.

Psychological debriefings. Clinical research conducted on the effects of psychological

debriefing techniques provided data relevant to the expression-discharge hypothesis.

Psychological debriefing is a group intervention technique developed for implementation

immediately after a traumatic event (see Dyregrov, 1997; Mitchell & Everly, 1995, for

overviews). Participants in small groups each describe what happened from their perspective.

They are asked to express their prominent thoughts about the event and to communicate the

worse aspects of their experience. The purpose of this technique is to prevent the development

of post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) which involve manifestations of intrusion and of

avoidance of memories of the traumatic episode. It is thus well suited to testing the

expression-discharge view. Recently, several meta-analytic reviews assessed the findings of

controlled studies conducted in this perspective (Arendt & Elklit, 2001; Rose & Bisson, 1998;

Van Emmerik, Kamphuis, Hulsbosch, & Emmelkamp, 2002). These reviews consistently

concluded that debriefings have no efficacy in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress

disorders or other trauma-related symptoms. Adverse effects were even found. However, in

spite of these inconclusive results regarding emotional recovery, psychological debriefing

procedures have generally demonstrated clear perceived benefits among participants. Quite

generally, people who have been exposed to a traumatic situation report that taking part in a

psychological debriefing was useful and beneficial to them. Thus, with the absence of a

recovery effect and a wealth of expressed benefits, the findings from studies of psychological

debriefings closely parallel those from social sharing studies.

The social sharing of laboratory-induced emotions. Finally, in three laboratory

studies, a movie-clip emotional induction was followed by either a social sharing session

about the movie, or by some control condition in which sharing was absent. Their findings

regarding recovery effects were hardly consistent. Both Mendolia and Kleck (1993) and

Lepore, Ragan and Jones (2000) observed recovery effects when participants were re-exposed

to the movie 48 hours later. Compared to the control groups, those who had shared their

emotion manifested lower perceived stress levels (Lepore et al., 2000) or reported feeling

more positive (Mendolia & Kleck, 1993). In addition, Mendolia and Kleck (1993) recorded

physiological recovery effects, but Lepore et al. (2000) did not replicate this finding. In a third

investigation, Lepore, Fernandez-Berrocal, Ragan, and Ramos (2004) assigned participants

who had viewed an emotional movie to either (1) a challenging partner, (2) a validating

partner, (3) a talk alone condition, or (4) a no-talk control condition. Compared to the “no

talk” group, participants in the challenging condition manifested a clearly superior recovery.

However, this result was not consistent with the findings from the two previously mentioned

studies. In both of those, recovery was favored by emotion talking—a condition which

compares with a validating (supportive) condition, and certainly not with a challenging one.

Conclusion. No consistent empirical support was found for the common view that

putting an emotional experience into words can resolve it. The abundance of null findings in

studies of the expression-discharge hypothesis strongly suggest that merely sharing an

emotion cannot change the emotional memory. Interestingly, Kennedy-Moore and Watson

(1999) reached a similar conclusion in their review of empirical studies on the “venting

hypothesis.” This hypothesis claims that the expression of distress, such as crying, or the

expression of anger, has direct and immediate effects of relief. At the end of their review,

Kennedy-Moore and Watson (1999) wrote: “At this point, it should be clear that the venting

hypothesis and its corollaries are myths. Whether or not expression of distress is beneficial

depends on what is expressed, to whom, and how” (p. 58).

A Direct Test of the Two Social Sharing Modes

Several studies directly tested the respective effects of the cognitive mode and the

socio-affective mode by varying listeners’ responses in social sharing situations (Nils &

Rimé, 2007b). In a random assignment, listeners adopted either a socio-affective response or

responses that would prompt cognitive work by the sharing person. Predictions were as

follows.

Predicted effects of socio-affective responses. If listeners adopt socio-affective

responses, should emotional recovery follow for the initiator? This model predicts a negative

answer. Emotional feelings could temporarily increase as a result of reviving the emotional

experience. Consequently, mental rumination, intrusive thoughts, and the need for sharing

may be enhanced in the period immediately following a sharing round. Should changes in

cognitions and motivations result from this socio-affective sharing? A negative answer is

implied by the model. Indeed, the initial appraisal of the event would be left unchanged,

frustrated goals would stay at the foreground, gaps in representations and schemas would not

be fulfilled, and nothing would have contributed constructively to the search for meaning

elicited by the episode. Should the destabilizing impact of the episode be buffered? In this

case, the model predicts a positive answer. After the sharing session, the initiator is expected

to report feelings of being recognized, validated, supported, the impression of relief, reduction

of loneliness, an increase in social integration, as well as a strengthening of shared beliefs. It

should be stressed, however, that these effects are at risk of being only temporary. Because

emotional recovery failed to be achieved in such an interaction, the emotional impact of the

episode can persist and may reactivate the destabilization. This is likely an explanation for

observations that demonstrate that despite recurrent sharing, people who failed to recover

from a given emotional experience keep manifesting the need to share it.

Predicted effects of cognitive responses. If listeners adopt responses that prompt

cognitive work, should emotional recovery follow for the initiator? The model predicts a

positive answer and thereby a subsequent reduction in mental rumination, intrusive thoughts,

and the need for sharing. Would change in cognitions and motivations be recorded after such

social interactions? Yes, indeed, according to the model. There are chances that, due to the

prompted cognitive work, the initial appraisal of the event would be modified, that frustrated

goals would be abandoned, that gaps in representation and schemas would be fulfilled, and

that the search for meaning would be brought to completion. Should the destabilizing impact

of the episode be buffered? The model proposes a negative answer. Nothing in these cognitive

responses condition would elicit feelings of being recognized, validated, and supported. There

would be no reduction of loneliness, and no enhancement of the feeling of integration. There

would be no strengthening of shared beliefs.

Experimental findings. In one of the experiments (Nils & Rimé, 2008), volunteer

students were individually induced into a negative emotional state using a movie clip.

Immediately after the movie, participants shared their movie experience with a friend of theirs

who came to the lab at the same time. Friends were used as targets because social sharing

studies repeatedly show that sharing very generally addresses friends. While the participant

watched the movie, the friend was instructed to maintain a systematic attitude in the sharing

session. In one condition, the friend had to maintain an empathetic attitude, which

corresponded to a socio-affective response. In a second condition, the friend had to manifest

positive reframing, which corresponded to one modality of cognitive responding. In a third,

control condition, the friend had to maintain a neutral attitude. Dependent variables were

measured immediately after the sharing session, and then 48 hours later after re-exposure to

movie. Participants completed scales assessing emotional, cognitive, and social variables with

emotional distress, beliefs and world views, and degree of loneliness, respectively.

The results showed that movie-related emotional distress was significantly lower in

the cognitive condition than in the two others. This effect was again observed after re-

exposure to the movie, thus confirming that a cognitively-oriented sharing brings emotional

recovery. In addition, after both sharing and movie re-exposure, beliefs and world views that

were challenged by the movie content (i.e., scenes of human cruelty toward animals), were

significantly less dampened in the cognitive condition than in the two others, thus confirming

that a cognitively-oriented sharing contributes to the reconstruction of assumptions. Finally,

after both sharing and movie re-exposure, loneliness scores were much lower in the socio-

affective condition than in the two others, thereby confirming the benefits of interpersonal and

social integration brought about by a socio-affectively-oriented sharing. Altogether, these

results, and those from other experiments, were quite consistent with the model.

Additional consistency emerged from studies mentioned earlier in which Lepore et al.

(2004) exposed students to a dramatic video (real-life gang scene) on two different days.

Participants were assigned to either (1) a challenging partner condition, comparable to Nils

and Rimé’ (2007) cognitive reframing condition, (2) a validating partner condition, which

resembled Nils and Rimé’ (2007) empathetic or socio-affective condition, (3) a condition in

which they talked alone about their reaction, or (4) a no talk control condition. The talk alone

and the validating condition did not differ, or only marginally, when compared to the no talk

group. Quite consistent with the proposed model, however, participants in the cognitive

reframing condition showed the greatest adjustment to stress. These participants reported the

lowest level of emotional distress during re-exposure to the video as well as the lowest levels

of intrusive thoughts and avoidance reactions.

Conclusions. These findings confirm that when social sharing situations stimulate

cognitive work, they can attenuate movie-related emotional arousal and rumination. Thus, in

compliance with the proposed model, a sharing situation that prompts cognitive responses can

produce the recovery effect that former studies, which focused on mere social sharing,

systematically failed to observe. The results also show that an empathetic sharing situation

provoke no effects, or only weak ones, on emotional arousal and rumination. This confirms

that emotional recovery effects are specific to cognitive work and cannot be achieved when

the social sharing situation is focused on socio-affective variables. However, in line with the

model, participants in the empathetic sharing condition rated their partner as more similar,

friendlier, and more empathic than the challenging or cognitive-reframing confederate. In

other words, whereas empathetic conferedates did not help to decrease movie-related

emotional arousal and rumination, they fulfilled participants' socio-affective needs better.

Thus, when listeners adopt socio-affective responses in the social sharing process, the

emotional distress elicited by the shared negative experience can be relieved, at least for some

time. The model predicts that in the absence of recovery effects, the benefits resulting from a

sharing situation of the socio-affective type would be only temporary.

In this study, the target emotion was the result of a laboratory induction. Because the

stress level from such an induction was probably minimal, participants could easily lend

themselves to cognitive work immediately afterward. This is unlikely to happen after a real-

life intense emotional experience. True cognitive work that involves change and creativity

cannot be expected on the part of a person experiencing intense emotional distress. This leads

to predict that an optimal timing exists for the respective onset of each of the socio-affective

and the cognitive sharing modes. In the period immediately following an emotional episode,

socio-affective sharing aimed at buffering the emotional distress should take precedence. As

time goes by, and as the emotional distress wanes, social sharing focused on cognitive work

should progressively take place. Future studies should examine the respective effects of these

two social sharing modes in the context of real-life emotional episodes of various levels of

intensity, and these studies should take into account the timing hypothesis.

General Conclusions

I conclude this article by taking stock of the theoretical considerations and empirical

findings which were reviewed. To this purpose, two specific questions will be addressed.

First, what are the various functions that the social sharing of emotion can serve? Second,

what does emotion research gain from the study of the social sharing of emotion?

Functions Served by Sharing Emotion

Hereafter, I will sum up the various functions that the social sharing of emotion fulfils,

or can fulfill. As will be apparent, there are many. Some of these functions have already been

submitted to empirical investigation, others are still completely open to investigation. In any

case, most of the work needed to clarify social sharing manifestations remains to be

conducted. I hope that the following overview will stimulate further research.

A first, very basic, function of emotion sharing is found in rehearsing, reminding, or

reexperiencing. For positive emotions, rehearsing essentially serves the purpose of

“capitalization.” Individuals can enhance their, and their targets’, current level of positive

affect by retelling a positive emotional episode. For negative emotions, rehearsing can fulfill

important functions with regard to the memory of emotional episodes. In the study of

collective emotional events, social sharing emerged as part of a more general rehearsal

process that also involved following news in the media. By talking about a public emotional

event, people both constructed a collective memory of the event and consolidated their own

memory of the personal circumstances under which they first heard about it (Finkenauer,

Gisle & Luminet, 1997). The storage of episodic information which rehearsing favors is

probably of high survival value in the case of personal emotional events.

The social sharing of emotion can cover many functions of the socio-affective kind.

Such functions are well captured by laypersons, as was evidenced by the investigation of the

motives they allege for sharing an emotional episode. As noted in Table 1, emotional sharing

can be instrumental in gaining social attention and interest from targets, or in arousing

empathy among targets. In line with such functions, emotional sharing appeared as a powerful

tool for stimulating bonding and for strengthening social ties. In addition, laypersons were

well aware of the various levels of help they can expect form targets when they share a

negative emotional experience: these levels can include help and support, comfort and

consolation, legitimization and validation, as well as reception of advice and solutions.

Besides these various socio-affective contributions, the social sharing of emotion can

fulfill many functions of the cognitive or of the symbolic type. As was apparent from

investigations of alleged motives for sharing, these motives are much less obvious to lay

observation. I will thus develop them in more detail.

First of all, emotion is a dense and diffuse experience in need of cognitive articulation.

By using language and by addressing others, individuals “unfold” the emotional material,

label it, and organize it into sequential relationships conforming to the rules of rational

thinking (Rimé, 1983, 1987; Werner & Kaplan, 1967). Repetitive communication about an

emotional experience lends itself to an evolution of its mental representation. For instance,

script-like formats can be imposed upon the shared experience; some elements can be

emphasized whereas others can be played down. The process of cognitive articulation can

contribute to a progressive distancing from this experience and to adoption of a decentered

point of view on the emotional material.

Next, emotion usually involves complex and unexpected eliciting circumstances, as

well as the perception of a complex set of abundant and often ambiguous exteroceptive and

interoceptive stimulations. As predicted by Festinger (1954), individuals confronted with

ambiguous information look for clarification in their social environment. That such a social

comparison process is aroused by emotional conditions was documented by Schachter’s

(1959) work on the stress-affiliation effect. Other cognitive-social processes are likely to be

involved in the social sharing of emotion. As emotions occur when forecasts fail, when

expectations are disconfirmed, and when activities in progress are blocked, they generally

bring forth a considerable loss of meaning (Weick, 1995). They challenge models and

assumptions about oneself and the world that are held by individuals to preserve a sense of

coherence, predictability, and control (e.g., Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Tait & Silver, 1989).

Festinger (1957) argued that when prophecies fail, believers are motivated to develop a

cognitive work of dissonance reduction. Cognitive dissonance research showed that people

who engage in dissonance reduction typically initiate communication (e.g. Festinger, Riecken

& Schachter, 1956). The process of social sharing is well-suited to respond to the quest for

meaning aroused by an emotion and to contribute to meaning production. In addition, story-

telling and the construction of a narrative can be at play in the social sharing of emotion. As

was stressed by Bruner (1990), unusual or exceptional circumstances stimulate the production

of narration because it allows for the sketching of a world within a context where the

encountered exception makes sense. Within the framework of a story, exceptions can be made

comprehensible. In addition, emotional circumstances generally involve unfamiliar or atypical

objects or events that are likely to shatter collective representations and shared knowledge. In

line with Moscovici’s (1984) views, the social sharing of emotion provides a frame in which

conversation develops. Conversation can transform and absorb unfamiliar elements into

social representation.

More generally, it was shown that emotional sharing propagates across a community.

This collective process can contribute to the construction and dissemination of social

knowledge about emotional episodes and emotional responses. Successive sharing rounds

about the same episode probably involve a process analogous to Bartlett’s (1932) “serial

reproduction,” which involves transmission of information through a chain of persons.

Bartlett observed that participants in studies on serial reproduction (a) transformed the

original material into a caricature, (b) changed meaningless aspects into meaningful ones, and

expectations. These observations suggested to Bartlett the notion of schemata. Schemata

liberate cognitive resources, allowing the person to focus on more novel and unexpected

aspects of the incoming information.

What Does Emotion Research Gain from the Study of the Social Sharing of Emotion?

Investigating the social sharing of emotion can change our view of what an emotion is

in many respects.

In contrast to classic homeostatic views rooted in animal models of emotion, social

sharing studies demonstrate that emotion is not a rapidly vanishing state bound to disappear as

soon as the emotional circumstances vanish. Emotion impregnates the subsequent life of the

affected persons. This impact can be long-lasting: the higher the intensity of the experience,

the stronger its hold on later life. Thus, an emotional experience is only the starting point for

important subsequent processes simultaneously involving cognitive, symbolic, affective and

social aspects. In such a context, emotion emerges not as a problem or state of confusion, but

as a response through which attention is allocated to the production of meaning. Contrary to

common views, emotion is in no manner antagonistic to cognition. In the present context,

emotions appear to be at the service of cognitive consistency and of meaning production.

They signal the occurrence of cognitive discrepancies between the assumed state of the world

and the current experience. They also exert a continuous motivational pressure on the person

in the direction of discrepancy reduction. Emotions are thus manifested as playing a central

role in the vicissitudes of human adaptation. They can be viewed as essential moments of

potential evolution and growth in the individuals’ life span. They contribute to expanding,

adapting, transforming and repairing the individual’s models, theories, assumptions and other

views of themselves and the world.

The study of the social sharing of emotion generated many arguments that discard the

Lone Ranger individualist perspective of adult emotional regulation. In sharp contrast with

the latter perspective, much data revealed that an emotional experience is virtually indivisible

of a social response. This response involves not only the need to be with others, as was

foreseen by Stanley Schachter’s (1959) pioneering work on stress and affiliation, but also the

need to talk to others, to tell them what happened, and to share with them what was felt and

thought. When individuals experience difficulties or obstacles in reaching their goals, they

urgently turn to other people around them with mutliple demands. Emotion is thus revealed as

a fundamentally interdependent process. It is in no manner limited to an internal process

constrained within the boundaries of an affected individual.

I proposed that the social manifestations elicited by emotional episodes originated in

attachment processes which were at play since infancy. According to my view, social

responses elicited by emotion in adults are no less than mature forms of these early

interdependent processes of emotional regulation. Thus, adults are not alone when they face

an obstacle, a loss, or other difficulties signaled by emotion. In such circumstances, their

deeply rooted social nature immediately comes into play. Even if the underlying motives

differ radically, positive emotional experiences elicit exactly the same social orientation as

negative ones. Theories of emotion will thus need to consider the fact that emotional

circumstances are systematically sparking social communication among human beings. The

available evidence now suggests that social responses following emotion can safely be added

to the various manifestations—facial-expressive, physiologic, behavioral, cognitive, and

phenomenal—traditionally regarded as the prototypical features of emotional responding.

Data from the study of the social sharing of emotion demonstrate the unexpected

breadth of the social consequences of emotion. They not only reveal that interactants

strengthen their ties and come close to one another by sharing emotion, they also show that a

social sharing interaction is the beginning of a propagation process in which all the successive

interactants experience similar effects for their own ties. Thus, the consequences of emotion

are far from being limited to the individual who experienced it. On the contrary, emotion

opens up processes that can enhance social integration and social cohesion within the larger

community. By the same token, emotion appears to open up a communal spreading of

emotional episodes through which individuals have lived, as well as of related questioning

and search for meaning. In this manner, every individual emotional experience acts as the

potential source of a shared process of cognitive construction to which many contribute.

Within the horizon of such findings, every individual emotion is to be conceived as another

opportunity for contributing to the construction of culturally-shared protection tools, such as

common sense, social knowledge, shared assumptions, and social representations. Thus, I

want to conclude this review by stressing that emotions experienced by individuals are not

only instruments at the service of individual adaptation, they are also major tools serving the

adaptation of members of a community.

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Table 1 A synthesis of alleged motives for sharing an emotional episode

(Rimé, 2007b)

Classes of motives

Typical members of the class

Rehearsing Reminding, re-experiencing, remembering

Venting Expressing, looking for relief, letting off steam, alleviating,

looking for catharsis

Help and support

Obtaining comfort, support, sympathy, help, receiving

comprehension, being listened to

Comfort/consolation Receiving consolation, receiving comfort

Legitimization, validation Being legitimized, approved, understood

Clarification and

meaning Finding understanding, finding explanation, clarification,

meaning

Advice and solutions Obtaining advice, feedback, guidance, receiving the perspective

of another person, receiving advice, finding solutions,

suggestions

Bonding, strengthening

social ties

Being in touch, relating, escaping loneliness or the feeling of

abandonment, strengthening social ties, decreasing

interpersonal distance, feeling closer to others

Arousing empathy

Touching/moving others, affecting the target, moving the

listener

Gaining attention

Receiving attention, eliciting interest, impressing others,

distinguishing oneself

Entertaining

“Lubricating” social interactions

Figure Captions

Figure 1 (a) Key elements in the dynamic of goal-pursuit in current life; (b)Multilevel

consequences of emotional experiences.

Figure 2. A model of the temporal evolution of emotional memories.

Figure 3. Interpersonal dynamic of the social sharing of emotion.

Figure 4. The social sharing of emotion propagation wave (from Rimé, 2005)

Figure 5. A model of the double impact of a past negative emotional episode

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Full-text available

Nov 1994

Self-disclosure plays a central role in the development and maintenance of relationships. One way that researchers have explored these processes is by studying the links between self-disclosure and liking. Using meta-analytic procedures, the present work sought to clarify and review this literature by evaluating the evidence for 3 distinct disclosure–liking effects. Significant disclosure–liking relations were found for each effect: (a) People who engage in intimate disclosures tend to be liked more than people who disclose at lower levels, (b) people disclose more to those whom they initially like, and (c) people like others as a result of having disclosed to them. In addition, the relation between disclosure and liking was moderated by a number of variables, including study paradigm, type of disclosure, and gender of the discloser. Taken together, these results suggest that various disclosure–liking effects can be integrated and viewed as operating together within a dynamic interpersonal system. Implications for theory development are discussed, and avenues for future research are suggested.

Emotional Disclosure Through Writing or Speaking Modulates Latent Epstein-Barr Virus Antibody Titers

Article

Full-text available

Feb 1994

Healthy Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) seropositive undergraduates (N = 57) completed a personality inventory, provided blood samples, and were randomly assigned to write or talk about stressful events, or to write about trivial events, during three weekly 20-min sessions, after which they provided a final blood sample. Individuals assigned to the verbal/stressful condition had significantly lower EBV antibody titers (suggesting better cellular immune control over the latent virus) after the intervention than those in the written/stressful group, who had significantly lower values than those in the written/trivial control group. Subjects assigned to the written/stressful condition expressed more negative emotional words than the verbal/stressful and control groups and more positive emotional words than the verbal/stressful group at each time point. The verbal/stressful group expressed more negative emotional words compared with the control group at baseline. Content analysis indicated that the verbal/stressful group achieved the greatest improvements in cognitive change, self-esteem, and adaptive coping strategies.

Moral Affect: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Article

Full-text available

Oct 1991

June P Tangney

The relations among 3 moral affective personality characteristics—shame-proneness, guilt-proneness, and empathic responsiveness—were examined in 4 independent studies of undergraduates. Results indicate that shame and guilt are distinct affective experiences that have important and quite different implications in the interpersonal realm. There was a substantial positive correlation between shame-proneness and guilt-proneness. Nonetheless, as predicted, other-oriented empathic responsiveness was negatively related to proneness to shame but positively correlated with proneness to guilt. In contrast, an index of more self-oriented personal distress was positively linked to shame-proneness. Taken together, these results add a new dimension to the ugliness of shame but suggest that guilt may not be that bad after all, at least in the interpersonal domain.

Disclosure of Traumas and Immune Function: Health Implications for Psychotherapy

Article

Full-text available

Apr 1988

Can psychotherapy reduce the incidence of health problems? A general model of psychosomatics assumes that inhibiting or holding back one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is associated with long-term stress and disease. Actively confronting upsetting experiences—through writing or talking—is hypothesized to reduce the negative effects of inhibition. Fifty healthy undergraduates were assigned to write about either traumatic experiences or superficial topics for 4 consecutive days. Two measures of cellular immune-system function and health center visits suggested that confronting traumatic experiences was physically beneficial. The implications for psychotherapy as a preventive treatment for health problems are discussed.

Confronting a Traumatic Event: Toward an Understanding of Inhibition and Disease

Article

Full-text available

Aug 1986

According to previous work, failure to confide in others about traumatic events is associated with increased incidence of stress-related disease. The present study served as a preliminary investigation to learn if writing about traumatic events would influence long-term measures of health as well as short-term indicators of physiological arousal and reports of negative moods. In addition, we examined the aspects of writing about traumatic events (i.e., cognitive, affective, or both) that are most related to physiological and self-report variables. Forty-six healthy undergraduates wrote about either personally traumatic life events or trivial topics on 4 consecutive days. In addition to health center records, physiological measures and self-reported moods and physical symptoms were collected throughout the experiment. Overall, writing about both the emotions and facts surrounding a traumatic event was associated with relatively higher blood pressure and negative moods following the essays, but fewer health center visits in the 6 months following the experiment. Although the findings and underlying theory should be considered preliminary, they bear directly on issues surrounding catharsis, self-disclosure, and a general theory of psychosomatics based on behavioral inhibition.

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

Book

Jun 1957

Leon Festinger

Constructing narrative, emotion, and self in parent–child conversations about the past

Chapter

Oct 1994

Robyn Fivush

This book brings a surprisingly wide range of intellectual disciplines to bear on the self-narrative and the self. The same ecological/cognitive approach that successfully organized Ulric Neisser's earlier volume on The Perceived Self now relates ideas from the experimental, developmental, and clinical study of memory to insights from post-modernism and literature. Although autobiographical remembering is an essential way of giving meaning to our lives, the memories we construct are never fully consistent and often simply wrong. In the first chapter, Neisser considers the so-called 'false memory syndrome' in this context; other contributors discuss the effects of amnesia, the development of remembering in childhood, the social construction of memory and its alleged self-servingness, and the contrast between literary and psychological models of the self. Jerome Bruner, Peggy Miller, Alan Baddeley, Kenneth Gergen and Daniel Albright are among the contributors to this unusual synthesis.

Psychological and Interactional Dimensions of Communicative Development

Chapter